Secure Your Web CMS with SecureLive, Software Plus Realtime Monitoring

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc | Published Nov 5, 2009

For most of us, a good day is being able to go about our business without any annoyances getting in our way. Unfortunately, when your business involves the Internet, mere annoyances rate much higher on the "good" scale than, say, discovering your Web CMS was hacked at least six months ago and you've been leaking critical user data like a sieve.

If that user data involves sensitive information such as medical data, credit card numbers, bank account information or anything else that is subject to either regulations or sleepless nights over losing your shirt, you should at least investigate security add-ons.

What is SecureLive?

Many of the security add-ons you'll find are specific to your CMS. However, there are also commercial products and services that offer various levels of additional support. Whether you need these extra services is entirely up to your particular use case.

For those who are interested in an extra level of security, one of the options is SecureLive. SecureLive is a combination of software and a live, real-time monitoring service for websites. Their big boast is that they offer blocking, alerting and reporting when you're attacked.

This software offers modules for Joomla!, WordPress, e107, Magento, general sites built purely in PHP and soon will have an offering for Drupal as well.

What Does SecureLive Do?

SecureLive monitors the network of sites it protects as a single unit, updating each client as new attackers make themselves known. One of SecureLive's claims to fame is that if any server it monitors is attacked, SecureLive does the following:

Alerts the person whose server is under attack.
Records data about the attacker such as attack strings, geo-tracking and other information that might be used for an identification.
Alerts SecureLive staff about the attack, who follow up by filing a report and forwarding evidence to the appropriate agencies for action against the attackers.
Alerts all SecureLive client software to adjust its security settings in case the same attacker strikes elsewhere.

See SecureLive in action in the SecureLive 7.0 quick walkthrough: