| What is a Web Page Change Monitor? |
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Experienced website administrators know they have to always be on their guard against hackers. Hackers seek to exploit any security hole in a website to insert their own malicious code. One tool you may consider adding to your arsenal is a Web Page Change Monitor.
With this, our monitoring systems are configured to access a page on your website just like a web-browser would, and see if it's been changed since the last time the monitoring system accessed that page.
The monitor would check every 15 minutes. If the file changed from the last time it checked, it would send an email based notification to whatever email address you've told us to notify. The next time it checks another notification would not be sent, unless the file changed AGAIN from the last time it checked it. When a change is detected, a notification is sent, and it then records that check as the baseline against which to compare for changes. So, 1 notification per change detected.
Our team is NOT notified with this type of monitor. The notification is for your benefit... for you to validate whether the change was expected (i.e., you published an update to that page) or not, and to action accordingly.
The monitor works by way of a checksum. Because it's checksum based (and not just checking the size of the page), it means it WILL detect a change even if a hacker modified a file but left it the same exact size it was previously. This is a good thing... checking based on size alone is not as effective. With a size based check, a page which loads with "ABC" looks the same as a page which loads with "123", because the total Bytes size of those two responses are exactly the same. With a checksum based test, the monitor can tell that even if the response was the same size, the characters within the response have been changed.
CAVEAT: if the page you want to check has content in it that changes dynamically, you cannot use the Web Page Change Monitor. For example, let's say the page you want to monitor pulls a data feed from CNN in order to display the latest CNN headlines within some area of your page. Every time those headlines are updated, our monitor would detect that your page changed. So with a page that has "dynamically changing content", even though the code of the page itself hasn't changed, you can't use this type of monitor.
Pricing for Web Monitors can be found at: http://3essentials.com/add-ons.asp
If you're ready to add a Web Page Change Monitor to your account, please contact our Billing or Support teams. |
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