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After you've gotten your website up and functioning, you'll need to keep a watch over it to make sure that it isn't being compromised by an online attacker. While it's impossible to catalog every possible attack vector, because new ones pop up every week, there are some common-sense warnings that you can watch out for.

Access Logs

Most of these have to do with scanning your website's activity logs. Merely saying "activity logs" gets a yawn out of most people, but really they're not all that difficult to use. Even if you don't know what every line means exactly, at least you can scroll through your log every other day and then when unusual patterns of activity show up, you'll recognize them.

One thing to watch for is repeated accesses using a "POST" method from the same IP address to the same web page which contains a form such as a log-in or comment field. The average user might take between three and ten tries at remembering their password before they just click your handy "recover lost password" link and go get it from their email. 355 attempts from the same IP within one hour is a big, obvious clue that somebody's trying to hack their way in.

Another sign is attempts at accessing a normally hidden file or a file which is usually not directly accessible. No legitimate web surfer should be trying to download "passwords.txt" or "_login.php" 150 times in a row. This is especially noticeable when it's obvious that they're trying multiple files that don't, in fact, exist on your site.

Massive multiple attempts of tens or hundreds of requests within the space of a few minutes are also a sure sign of a bot. An automated attack program operates much faster than a human, but is also much more "stubborn", so you'll see it making mistakes that no human would do. Keep in mind that search engines also use bots to index your site, but they will only access the normal pages viewable to the public, and only one access for each file.

Website security is a deep subject, but this short article should at least give you a few hints to watch for the most common problems.