A domain name that’s a unique address to your website represents your brand identity and is the key for visitors to access your website and view its content.
Just as it’s crucial to choose the right and relevant domain name for your brand, it’s also crucial to secure that domain name from online threats, like phishing and pharming attacks.
If a hacker gets access to your account through your website’s domain name registrar, they can easily steal and hijack your domain name—diverting all your site’s traffic to their website and dropping your website’s traffic to zero.
Around 33% of organizations experienced a domain-targeted cyberattack in 2020, which grew from 23% in 2019. Moreover, 56% of organizations find security their biggest domain management challenge.
Thus, while domain management and security involve the role of legal teams, it’s primarily the IT team’s responsibility to ensure the utmost domain name security.
So, if you’re wondering, “how do I secure a domain name from these malicious attacks?” you’re at the right place. This article shares critical tips to secure your business domain name and sustain its online presence and business reputation.
How to Secure a Domain Name for your Business
Here are a few crucial tips to secure a domain name for your website and ensure your business’s long-term success.
- Regularly renew your domain name
Setting up a renewal process for your domain name is one of the simplest ways to secure it. For this, you can schedule a repetitive renewal reminder, which will nudge you about your domain name’s renewal well in advance.
Typically, you can renew the domain name after every one, two, or even five years. Moreover, many domain name registrars make website owners synchronize the domain, ensuring the date of expiration is the same—making it easier to manage the domain name renewal.
- Secure your account
It’s essential to secure your account to prevent access to the domain name, using strong passwords that are long and difficult to guess for the attackers. You must also change this password regularly to prevent breaches.
Employing Two or Multi-Factor authentication for your account is also a best practice to restrict account access.
- Choose domain privacy
Many reliable domain registrars offer free domain privacy or a minimal charge to prevent your name, contact information, and address from being compromised or freely available on the web.
This is important as hackers can use this information to transfer your domain name to some other user or contact you to fool you into sharing your account password and other credentials to use it maliciously.
- User registrar lock
At the same time, many registrars also offer registrar lock, also known as transfer lock or domain lock, which helps prevent your business domain from illegally or accidentally getting transferred without your consent.
The registrar lock locks the domain, ensuring that the transfer can only occur when you log in to your account and unlock the domain. Thus, this lock helps prevent domain transfer by someone impersonating you through emails or calls.
- Use Extensive Provisioning Protocol (EPP)
Extensive Provisioning protocol provides an additional layer of security for your domain protection, where you need to select AIC, a unique Authorization Information Code for each one of your domains.
You’ll need to give this AIC to your new domain registrar or hosting provider before the domain transfer process if you decide to transfer to another registrar.
Conclusion
You must not take domain name security lightly, as it plays a significant role in sustaining your business’s online reputation, credibility, and uptime.
We hope this article helps answer your question about “How do I secure a domain name in NZ.” So, search for the perfect domain name registrar to help you find a suitable domain name for your business and ensure its security.