Here's part two of our tutorial showing you how you could be sabotaged and ways to avoid it. Now we've come to the more complex ways of throwing a wrench in the cogs. These methods are a bit harder to achieve, a bit harder to dodge, but also, more efficient.

Hacking - now this is illegal and if noticed, you should definitely inform law enforcers. You can get hit in several ways, depending on what the competitor actually wants. In case you didn't know, they can take your site down really fast with what's called a "Denial of Service" attack. This can be highly efficient for the competition if triggered at the right time. Say you just hit the market with a new product and people want to know more about it from your site. Well, the competition can take it down so that you get no traffic at all. There are several ways that in which this can be achieved, but I'm not going to list them, because some people might get stupid ideas. In any case, to avoid this you have to make sure that your site is properly secured and that it has as few flaws as possible.

Then, there are attacks that don't take down the site, but seriously thwart traffic. These are also hack-based, thus illegal. The competition can hack into your page and insert code that would redirect any traffic to their page. This type of code has been used for quite a while now, because sometimes firms change domains, and people still access the old sites, so in order not to lose traffic, they employ this redirection code. So, the code itself is not malicious, only the way it's used is. There are similar ways of traffic stealing that involve site hacking or not, but the thing is that, in order to dodge this, you need to regularly check your site and how it's indexed by search engines, because the competition could go and make a search engine think that your site has moved to a new location - namely to their site!

There are, of course other things that the competition can do, I just mentioned a few that are really important. There's not much you can do to stop them from trying, but if you always keep an eye out for possible sabotage, you're bound to be safer. Paranoia WILL take you somewhere in what security's concerned, so you should always be vigilant!