The Importance of Site Monitoring

Having a website is not only about hosting and code development. It is not planning and executing a single process only.

On the opposite, it is a recurring process since we must do maintenance, update content and perform site monitoring, as well. The last one may generate your curiosity.

Question: Why lived website shall be monitored?

As we always updating content and doing maintenance, there will always possibility of defacement potential performed by a defacer (or hacker).

Changes/defacements in our website are indicated by the changes of the website appearance; pictures and/or words are scrawled across the defaced website.

We have written before in Defacer's Behavior to explore what are defacer reasons and behaviours in defacing other people's websites. Their conduct is relatively similar to property vandalism. Some attackers who oppose the ruling government or a particular movement. In different cases, attackers mocking the site owner by discovering and exploiting site vulnerabilities to take destructive action.

As discussed before in Dynamic Interface of the Website, we can put various content (image, animation, and video) inside our website.

Question: What to be monitored by a Site Monitoring tool?

Every change. But not every change is that significant. Therefore, we shall categorise what shall be included as critical change and non-critical change. Later on, we may call the critical one as 'Alert'. So, keep in mind that not every change shall be classified as 'alert'.

In SentryPage, we only classify historical-based defacement as a reference before judging a change into the 'Alert' category. The references may in form of defacer's signature, propaganda distribution, etc.

Secondly, we add an Animation Disabler feature in SentryPage. To make those animation elements do not impact the visual changes on the capture result, we set the animation playback rate to zero. So, when capturing dynamic webpages, we will not get consistent visual changes.

After all, Site Monitoring is really that important in website maintenance.

You shall try SentryPage as we provide free service for the initial engagement in the site monitoring world.