"Menace" of Hacking

“Menace” of Hacking

Published October 31, 2011 |

Why don’t we start by saying – there is not 100% protection from hacking. Adult videos on the Sesame Street or hijacks of government sites – there are numerous ways to make a statement or profit from web attacks. Open source Content Management Systems are developed by communities of software engineers, and hackers, and despite constant attacks they manage to keep the pace and a relative security. Are the free CMS more vulnerable than the more expensive options? For most small organizations that is the price they wish to pay.

You will always find on CMS sites like Joomla or WordPress the latest stable versions of software and the latest test versions, both for download. We make sure we are working with the latest stable versions when we help you create your sites. However, in many cases our partner organizations are acquiring their first experiences and do not have a long term vision nor stable budgets to think of all the aspects of web strategies. They would be happy to learn how to update and manage their site, how to work with photos or pdfs, and would forget that their Content Management System needs maintenance and care. Improved and more secure software versions appear every couple of months and as we said, CMS-based web sites are not entirely free! Besides paying your hosting fees, you need minimal investments to do regular backups and update your CMS.

Basic Maintenance We Do

DAG Nova offers two types of basic maintenance to its partners.

1) More than 100 hours per year of volunteer technical support and site maintenance for those that do not have stable funding nor entirely developed web strategies.

That includes two backups per year and resolving problems as they arise. Pretty much in reaction to what is happening.

2) Maintenance for a minimal cost up to 500$ to those partners that are able to budget it annually.

This support includes quarterly backups, regular upgrades of the software, including technical support up to 200$ per year.
Another couple of hundred dollars can be added here for “migrations” to a new stable generation of the software, if necessary, and for installation and maintenance of anti-virus packages for CMS. Prevention is always better than only reacting to problems.

So, hacking incidents have been in some cases an important “teachable moments”, and a step toward building a more complete web strategy. We will continue supporting you and learning together. Did we mention that social media strategy can as well be developed before things “happen”?