5 Essential Ways to Keep Your Domain Name Safe and Secure

In the increasingly hostile online environment where hackers, scammers, and spammers are doing everything they can to access sensitive business information, there is a need for business leaders to take their cybersecurity strategy seriously and expand it to protect their domain names from nefarious intent. Just like all other company data, your domain name is a potential entryway for hackers and scammers to gain access to your system, extract information, and use it to blackmail you or sell it to the highest bidder. Needless to say, this is something that can ruin your brand’s reputation in the long run.

This is why it’s important to prioritize domain name security from the very start, and employ the right security measures and solutions to ensure long-term domain safety in the face of evolving online trends. With that in mind, let’s go over the five essential ways you can keep your domain name safe and secure.

Find a trustworthy registrar

First things first, domain security starts with the registrar. Whether you’re still shopping around for your domain or if you’re looking to strengthen the security of your domain portfolio as a whole, it’s important that you research the best and most trustworthy registrars before buying a domain or migrating one. The registrar you choose needs to have a verifiable track record and a whole list of satisfied customers, but your search shouldn’t stop there.

Registrars will post only success stories, while the not-so-successful ones get pushed under the rug, which means that you need to do a little digging of your own. Be sure to look for honest online reviews from past customers, ask questions on relevant forums, and try to find out why some customers have left a certain registrar. You might find that their subpar security measures drove some customers away, which is, of course, a red flag.

Lock up your domain

Typically, customers and business owners will want to keep their domain names accessible (with only the right log-in information needed) in order to be able to optimize and update any domain information or alter their DNS configuration if necessary. However, this will invariably put your domain at risk of unwanted entry and it will allow intruders to steal and alter important information at will. This is why you should consider putting your domain under a registrar lock, which will only allow you to alter information once you have unlocked the domain itself.

Think of the registrar lock as the second lock in addition to your account log-in info, and a first line of defence. Once you have locked up to your domain, don’t forget to check its status on occasion, and report any issues or if you notice any alterations that you have not made yourself to the registrar immediately.

Emphasize registrars that monitor online behaviour

Circling back to the topic of registrars, don’t forget to research every registrar you’re interested in for the solutions they employ to keep their domains secure at all times. Particularly, look for the best domain registrar that emphasizes spam, malware, and phishing monitoring as a part of their domain name security solution to ensure domain safety on a 24/7 basis, and complement their overarching security strategy. It’s imperative that your registrar employs a team of people as well as the right technology to monitor online behaviour and traffic, and act proactively to any threats rather than fixing any issues as they arise.

What’s more, your registrar should provide you with additional security features like the aforementioned registry lock, as well as DNS security extensions that will redirect users from a compromised website to a secure online location that is controlled by the authorities. This way, even if your domain does get compromised, you will preserve your brand’s reputation by keeping your visitors safe.

Keep your domain information private

It should go without saying that you mustn’t share your domain account information with anyone. Sure, if you trust your web developers enough, the give them access codes, but your site should be off-limits to anyone else. Every person who has your access information is a potential security breach, keep that in mind. Likewise, consider adding privacy protection to your plan. This will hide the important information about your company and its owners that hackers and scammers could leverage against you.

Update passwords regularly

Finally, you need to create a truly unique password for your account, and you need to update it periodically. That said, you shouldn’t be the one creating the password itself, because hackers have a way of digging up human-made passcodes. Simply put, you are biased, so instead of using birthdays or your dog’s name, choose a password management tool that will generate truly randomized strings of letters and special characters to make your account passcode as impervious as it can get. After a couple of months, feel free to generate a new password, just in case.

Wrapping up

The online world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place as the years go by and as hackers are becoming increasingly aware of just how lucrative it can be to obtain and sell sensitive business information. Don’t let anyone enter your system and smear your brand’s reputation, instead, use these tips to keep your domain name safe and secure all year long.