How To Build A Landing Page That Blocks Malware Attacks

Landing pages are inviolate. They can really make the difference between an impactful campaign and one that leaves you wondering why the results aren’t showing up. The right landing pages turn visitors into fans and brand advocates, so more people start to pay attention, which can help not only build a strong relationship but also snag future sales. Investing time and effort in creating well-designed, optimized landing pages is worthwhile because they drive top-of-funnel growth. Without them, you don’t have a clue about the people visiting your website, which makes it hard, if not impossible, to convert them into paying customers.

Running your own website means that you’re ultimately responsible for its security. While the hosting provider takes care of the underlying infrastructure, it’s up to you to make sure the code, dependencies, updates, and security of the application remain intact. Cyber threats are out of control, which means that malicious actors are always on the lookout for new ways to outsmart us. These attackers frequently target landing pages because they boast high traffic month after month and, for the most part, have weak security. A compromised page doesn’t just expose sensitive data. It crushes your brand’s credibility in seconds.

Sometimes, A Hacker Will Only Swap Out An Image Or A Bit Of Text

It’s really important to monitor your website for suspicious behavior. Images can be implanted with messages that are invisible to the naked eye but can trigger someone’s computer to carry out harmful actions, such as sending over passwords. That basically means that the next person who lands on your site will have their PC poisoned as well. Threat actors can inject a malicious script into your website, so when a visitor loads the page, their browser automatically redirects them to a fake login page. Personal and financial information is what they’re after. You don’t realize the site code was changed until it’s too late.

But They’re Capable Of Inflicting Far More Serious Harm

Hackers can launch devastating attacks from their secret lairs, taking control of the entire business or using the platform as a launchpad for bigger crimes. To be more precise, if they get deep enough into the site’s code, they can encrypt every file on your web server, taking your database offline until you pay a huge ransom. Malicious actors can damage your system by injecting malicious code that turns your server into a bot. The website loads as usual, but in the background, it’s used to mine cryptocurrency or launch cyberattacks on government agencies.

How To Protect Your Landing Page From Malware Attacks

Using a reputable landing page builder is widely acknowledged to be safe. As a matter of fact, it’s a standard practice because these platforms follow strict security protocols, apply updates on a regular basis, and handle many of the vulnerabilities that individual site owners might overlook. Be that as it may, you must bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a completely safe website on the Internet. Security is your number one priority, even when using a top-tier builder, so you should still follow best practices to minimize exposure to threats, such as:

Implement A Content Security Policy

A content security policy (CSP) is the most powerful tool in your arsenal, so use it to keep bad actors at bay. It’s an HTTP response header that gives you complete control over what resources – JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. – can be loaded in the visitor’s browser, and the URLs that they can be loaded from. This prevents cross-site scripting, which poses risks to both data integrity and user privacy. Use the directive script-src 'self' to have a guarantee that only your code runs. It’s not a good idea to allow scripts from external domains because if there’s any way for a perpetrator to control content that’s served from the external domain, they’ll spearhead an attack.

Harden Form Validation & Sanitization

‘Contact’ and ‘Sign-up’ forms serve as entry points for multiple attack classes, such as spam propagation, session hijacking, and privilege escalation, to name but a few. Threat actors don’t have to set up their own phishing infrastructure, and neither do they have to put in a great deal of effort to take over legit emails. Since the message comes from a trusted domain, there’s a slim chance it’ll go to spam. You should never ever trust client-side validation alone. Clean user-submitted data to ensure the input becomes plain text, with no ability to run code in the browser or on the server.

CAPTCHAs can be annoying for users, especially more challenging ones like image recognition or distorted text, because they add further steps to form submissions. The new generation of bots can solve CAPTCHAs there and then, so it’s best to replace them with behavioral AI that spots bot-like movement without ruining the user experience. If your landing page allows uploads (e.g., a resume), only allow specific extensions, such as .pdf, which are far less dangerous than .exe or .zip attachments.

Shield The Front-End Supply Chain

More often than not, malware makes its entrance through third-party libraries, such as older versions of jQuery, which are susceptible to cross-site scripting and other vulnerabilities, or tracking pixels, typically embedded in JavaScript and HTML code. If you use a content delivery network (CDN) to free up your server’s resources, use a subresource integrity (SRI) hash to ensure that, in the worst-case scenario that the library on the CDN is hacked and replaced with malware, your landing page will refuse to load it. Though it seems like a hypothetical attack, it’s happened many times before.

Wrapping It Up

When you use a landing page builder, you don’t have to worry about SSL certificates, server patching, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, but that still leaves you exposed to code injection, which ranks among the most severe cybersecurity threats. Once your website has been hacked, there’s little you can do to fix the problem, and to prevent getting to that point, you have to put in the hours.