Forms Aren’t Just Simple Contact Boxes

It’s easy to think of a contact form as nothing more than a few boxes that someone fills out.  But behind that simple form, your website is receiving and processing information.  The same is true for quote requests, appointment scheduling, customer logins, applications, and other interactive features.

If these tools aren’t built and secured properly, someone could potentially use them to attack the website or gain access to information they shouldn’t have.

For example, a poorly secured form could potentially be used to:

• Send harmful commands to the website database
• Add unwanted or malicious content to the website
• Redirect visitors to scam or malicious websites
• Steal information from a user’s login session
• Flood your inbox with spam or fake leads

That doesn’t mean every form is a security threat.   It simply means forms need to be built, tested, and maintained with security in mind.

AI Can Produce Code That Works—but Isn’t Secure

This is one of the things business owners need to understand about AI.  AI can write code remarkably quickly.  But code that works isn’t necessarily code that is secure.

AI learns from enormous amounts of information available online. That includes excellent programming practices, but it also includes old code, outdated tutorials, incomplete examples, and techniques that developers stopped recommending years ago.  As a result, AI can sometimes produce code that looks perfectly fine and works exactly as expected, while still leaving a security hole.

For example, AI-generated code may not properly protect information submitted through a form.  That can create vulnerabilities that allow attackers to:

• Attack a database: Someone enters specially crafted information into a form in an attempt to access, change, or delete database information.
• Inject malicious scripts: Someone enters harmful code into a form, comment, or other field that could run when another person views the information.
• Attack a login system: A poorly protected login can make it easier for automated programs to repeatedly guess passwords.

The frustrating part is that none of these problems necessarily look obvious.  The form may work perfectly.  The website may look great.  Everything may appear normal to the business owner.

The security problem could still be there.

AI Can Also Recommend the Wrong Plugin

Most modern websites use plugins, packages, libraries, or integrations to add functionality.  Maybe you need appointment scheduling.  Maybe you want online payments, email marketing, a customer portal, live chat, analytics, or a map.  AI can be helpful when you’re researching these tools, but there’s a catch.

You shouldn’t automatically trust every plugin or software package AI recommends.

The recommendation could be outdated.  The developer may no longer maintain it.  It may have a poor security history.  It may not work well with your website platform.  And, in some cases, AI can even make up the name of a software package that doesn’t actually exist.   That’s where things can get especially interesting from a security standpoint.

An attacker could potentially create a package using a name that sounds legitimate, hoping someone will find it through an AI recommendation or search and install it without checking where it came from.   Before installing any plugin or package, take a few minutes to verify:

• Who created it?
• Is it still being actively maintained?
• When was it last updated?
• Does it have a trustworthy reputation?
• Is it compatible with your website platform?
• What kind of access does it have to your website and customer information?

Don’t install something simply because an AI tool says it’s a good option.

AI Is a Tool—not Your Security Department

AI can be incredibly useful for researching, building, and improving a website.   But when security is involved, it shouldn’t get the final say.  Before a new form, plugin, integration, or custom feature goes live, someone who understands website security should review it.  That means making sure the tool comes from a legitimate source, testing how it handles information, checking what access it requires, and looking for potential security problems before customers start using it.

The goal isn’t to avoid AI.  The goal is to use AI without blindly trusting it.

And that’s an important distinction.

In Part 3, we’ll look at one of the biggest mistakes businesses make with their websites: assuming that once the site launches, the work is finished.   It isn’t.   Launch day is really just the beginning of keeping a website secure.