Web server protection: Web server security monitoring

Introduction

Web server security is important in ensuring the correct operation of your websites. It allows you to identify vulnerabilities and any other security issues found to exist within the web server before an attacker can use them to cause a compromise. 

In this article, we shall take a look at how to generally monitor any web server for security issues. We will also discuss the various considerations that should be taken during web server security monitoring.

Overview

During the monitoring of your web server security, there are some general things which you must look out for. You should be able to answer the following questions:

• Is your web server vulnerable? You need to determine whether the web server is vulnerable to any vulnerabilities that have been recently released. In order to do this, you need to perform a vulnerability assessment of your web server to identify any existing vulnerabilities
• Is your web server under attack right now? You need to be able to determine whether you are undergoing an attack by assessing requests to web server resources
• Is your web server compromised? You will need to discover any file changes to the file system that have either resulted in file additions or deletions, as a result of malware

You should always be able to answer the questions above. You should also take into consideration the following things as you monitor the security of your web servers:

1. Pending security updates

Security updates are always released by solution vendors, and you should always ensure that you are running up-to-date software. This is important since software updates are regularly being released and details of patches published. If hackers access this information before you can patch your servers, they can be able to compromise the servers.

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2. New and unpatched vulnerabilities

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