The internet is a big place, and scattered throughout the world are people who would like nothing more than to control the computer systems that you own or manage. Increasingly hackers (technically crackers) are turning compromised computers to the pursuit of monetary gain.

It does not matter that you “store no credit card data” or that you only run a few personal blogs, any computer connected to the internet is a target and a prize for hackers. Uses of compromised servers:

Spam - acting as relays for millions of unsolicited emails, spammers are not just pests they can be costly, chewing through your bandwidth, damaging your reputation and distrupting your email communications when you end up getting blacklisted.

Storage - illegal software, music, video and images will result in a disruption of your services, costly bandwidth and potential for damaging legal issues when the source gets traced back to a computer you own or manage.
Distributition of malware - After compromising your host it may be used to host exploits on your web server, this means the server you own or manage is being used to compromise other hosts.

As a jump point - direct attacks against other systems on the internet. Tracing the origin of an attack will reveal that the attack came from an IP address under your control.

Data Harvesting - direct attacks against your host to collect customer records, credit card numbers or membership details. Sql injection is a popular method for this as the vulnerability provides direct access to the database.

Using a vulnerability scanner provides the owner or manager of an internet host or website with a report detailing any obvious security risks that can be attended to and resolved before the hackers hit.

There are a number of excellent open source products available that are as good if not better than expensive commercial software. Not everyone who runs a website or internet host is a large corporation that can afford a dedicated network security team. This is where HackerTarget.com hopes to help.

We provide an affordable and easy way to get a vulnerability scanning process implemented on your internet host or web site.