HostingCon Global 2016 Countdown: New Trends in Web Application Security

The countdown to HostingCon Global 2016 in New Orleans is on with five days to go before the hosting and cloud industry touches down at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Education is one of the defining aspects of the HostingCon conferences, and with so many excellent sessions and opportunities for learning we wanted to spend the next week offering a preview for our readers who are attending HostingCon.

Without a doubt it’s been an interesting year for cybersecurity, and while in many ways security threats have become more complicated, service providers are having an easier time talking to customers about the importance of security solutions because of growing awareness.

Over the last year, several trends have emerged, but one that sticks out to SiteLock president and HostingCon speaker Neill Feather is that attackers are starting to more aggressively starting to target small and medium-sized businesses – who are in turn looking to their hosting providers for help mitigating these threats.

“We’re beginning to see more awareness of the issue from these small and medium sized businesses, and I think one of the good things from a hosting community perspective is there’s been a lot more pull from the end customers to make sure their website is secure, and they’re asking more and more about products to help them do that,” Feather said.

SiteLock provides website security solutions and partners with web hosting providers to deliver these solutions to end customers. Feather said that this past year has been a year of growth for the company, who had to move offices in Scottsdale to accommodate its 150 employees. SiteLock currently protects around 8 million websites.

In his HostingCon session on Mon., July 25 at 9 a.m., Feather will share some research on “effectiveness around using traditional tools versus purpose-built tools to help protect web applications, and give people a bit of a view into why it’s important to use the right tool for the right job.”

“Beyond that we want to show some of the advances that we’ve been making around being more proactive in identifying risk to a website prior to a compromise,” he said.

“Once there’s a vulnerability or a compromise you’re having a more negative conversation with customers. We want to enable our hosting partners to have more of a proactive conversation and we’ve got some products in the works to help them with that,” he said.

Interested in other security topics? Check out the full HostingCon schedule to learn how to better mitigate DDoS attacks, what the encryption landscape looks like today, and how government regulation impacts your business.

Source: TheWHIR