Spotlight: How a Digital Marketing Agency Secures Client Sites

Based in Melbourne, Australia for over 17 years, 24Digital knows what it takes to succeed in the ever-evolving digital marketing space which is no longer a world resting on desktop alone. The goal is to be an extension to every client’s marketing department, a true partnership to launch or rebuild effective websites – from WordPress to Magento ecommerce sites, and everything in between.

We’re creative technologists. Hybrids of the digital world.

Owner Jess Knollmeyer understands how to communicate with the hundreds of clients her company manages. In order to provide the best service, a considerable amount of time and effort must be given to uncover each unique set of challenges and find improved ways to streamline business operations.

At a core level, most client’s problems stem from not getting enough engagement on their website or not getting enough traffic on their websites. The solution is very individual. It can be looking at the content they’re offering. Do they need to employ a copywriter, or a photographer who will help them with a weak spot in the business? Sometimes, it’s operational or design based. User experience helps improve design.

Scan Detection

As technical innovators, agencies are the storytellers who help build and maintain a businesses brand and online presence. But Jess believes along with that, web security goes hand-in-hand in preventing hard work virtually being undone.

For years, 24Digital leveraged the free Sucuri SiteCheck scanner to stop such circumstances which detect suspicious activity via the scanning engines. Neglecting this aspect can involve various risks for both the agency and client.

I love the platform! It’s been really helpful for us. We like to share as much knowledge with our clients as we can. We like to position ourselves as a team that could potentially fit within their small business as opposed to an external agency. The more knowledge that we can share about digital, about online, about internet security, it helps us create a better partnership. And, it’s valuable information to our clients and makes the ongoing partnership easy.

Downtime

As technically savvy as Jess is, even she got caught in the tricky web of convenience versus safety. A critical security incident had never happened to her website, nor any of her clients, until now.

It’s a major flooring company here in Australia. They have about 140 stores across Australia, and we manage their website. We got a notice from Rackspace, their hosting provider. Their site was down, and we logged into the website platform only to see some crazy spikes in monitoring activity. At that point, the whole team was pretty busy and I attempted to jump into terminal. I’m a project manager – I don’t do that. But, we needed to get some reports.

Although Jess had some skills to investigate, it was an uphill battle. She needed professionals who do this kind of research every day.

We basically figured out that the site was under attack. It was the same day that there was a big security release for XMLRCP. Those attacks were hitting really hard from that day on. So, we really had to scramble and essentially we had to decide what we would do.

Education in a Crisis

Simultaneously, Jess educated her client on the importance of having some form of website security in place (not just an alert system) as she made a call to Sucuri.

We’d used Sucuri before for scans, but we never used the firewall or the malware clean up services. Sucuri immediately came to mind. We logged onto the website, saw the firewall and said, “Quick! Let’s go!”.

After signing up, Jess saw clear benefits from the Sucuri Firewall as the attacks suddenly ceased.

(The Firewall) probably saved our skin. Immediately when the firewall was activated, the threats stopped. The site was protected, and it saved us from a major headache over the weekend – it happened on a Friday afternoon around 5pm.

To learn how this digital marketing agencies story ends, please read the full 24Digital Case Study! We provide our products and services to many web professionals like Jess Knollmeyer under our Sucuri agency plan.

If you would like to be featured as our next customer case study, email us at marketing@sucuri.net

For more information on website security for your agency, please visit us at sucuri.net or chat with our Team.