If you run a brick-and-mortar store, you would invest in all manner of protective measures to ensure that your business was capable of deterring crime. As the owner of an eCommerce site, you must invest in just as high a level of security. Crime is just as prevalent on the Internet as it is in the ‘real world’ which is why you must safeguard your online store at all costs. If you don’t, your livelihood could be ruined at any given moment, on any given day.
In last month we have shared guide to Keep your Ecommerce site secure about how you can protect your Ecommerce site and your customer’s data.
In this guide, we have an updated guide with cybercriminals hacks to make sure you have an advanced checklist to make more secure your online store. When you decide to take on the all-important challenge of protecting your eCommerce store against cybercrime, be sure to put the advice laid out below into practice.
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Find a protection solution that suits you.
Your eCommerce site is an entity unto itself. Depending on its size, scale, and industry, It has its specific wants and needs. This means that you can’t just invest in a bog-standard protection solution and then hope that it is going to be enough to protect your site going forward. You have to find a solution that suits your online store precisely.
Fortunately, the Net Threat company SonicWall Online makes finding the right protection solution easy. This leading security reseller makes a host of different IT security products available, meaning you will always be able to find the exact form of technology you need to ensure your store’s ongoing safety. Whether you need a web application firewall or a unified endpoint that offers multiple protection capabilities, SonicWall will have you covered.
Know what you’re up against
No matter what protection solutions you invest in, you still need a basic knowledge of cybercrime if you’re to protect your eCommerce site against it.
Here are just some of the types of cybercrime that you should be aware of:
• Botnets
• Ransomware
• Phishing
• Browser hijacking
• Fraud
• Malware
• Trojans
Switch to HTTPS
Until recently, HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Safety) hosting was only used to safeguard the payment section of eCommerce websites. Today, however, more and more online store owners are protecting their whole website using this form of security protocol.
When you secure your whole site with HTTPS, you will protect the confidentiality of the data that is shared between your site and the people that access it. As a result, you won’t have to worry about your customer’s private information being hacked into, which ultimately means that you won’t have to contend with unhappy customers who claim that your site isn’t safe to use. If your eCommerce store were to gain the unpleasant reputation of being a site that doesn’t protect its customers, you can be sure that you wouldn’t have too many people bringing you their custom going forward. Answer this: would you choose to access a site if doing so put your data at risk of being hacked into?
HTTPS is such a robust form of security because of the three layers of protection that it offers. These layers include:
Encryption — when data is encrypted, it cannot be hacked into, tracked, or stolen by third-parties or other external forces
Data integrity — this safeguards data from being modified or corrupted in any way
Authentication — man-in-the-middle attacks are thwarted by authentication, only because it ensures that users are communicating solely with the websites that they intend to disclose with
Aside from the added layers of security that you will be able to enjoy when you switch to HTTPS, you will also stand to improve your search engine optimization. Google now deem HTTPS hosting to be a ranking factor, which means you could be penalized with regards to your SEO if you don’t make this all-important switch.
Never hold onto customer data.
If your eCommerce platform ever allows you to store the customer data that you gather when you take card payments, decline it. You should never hold onto this all-important personal information, simply because doing so puts a target on your back with regards to cybercrime.
Being a sitting duck for cybercrime isn’t the only thing that makes holding onto customer data such a wrong practice, though. Should the personal information that you store in your systems ever be hacked into and subsequently compromised, you could be handed a pretty hefty fine. The authorities won’t care if you were the victim of the hacking, and pleading your innocence indeed won’t result in them going light on you. Established organizations like Marriott and Equifax have incurred sizeable eight-figure fines in 2019 for putting customer data at risk, which shows just how serious the regulators take improper conduct in this instance.
Of course, declining the opportunity to store customer data will make life a lot harder for you. For one, it will mean that you will continuously have to input data for your customers that return to your online store over and over again. Fear not, however, as there is a way to retain access to your customer data without having to worry about it being compromised or breached on your watch. By enlisting the services of a payment gateway provider, you will be able to keep your payments both offsite and in reach. This external merchant service will authorize and process your credit/debit card payments for you, which means that they will also handle your sensitive customer data on your behalf.
Over to you!
Cybercriminals don’t sleep, which means that you can’t take any time off when it comes to preventing this form of criminality. If you want to keep your eCommerce site safe from harm, you have to put the above advice practice at all conceivable points. The second you stop in this instance is the second you grant a cybercriminal access to all of your essential data.
If you are using Magento for your Ecommerce platform, We can help you to assure the security for your Magento store by availing our service Magento Security Patches Installations, and you can easily make your store secure and prevent from cyber hacks.
Find a protection solution that suits you, become aware of all the dangers that you face, switch to HTTPS, and never hold onto your customer data — if you do all of that, your eCommerce site will no doubt be able to deter cybercrime for years to come. As a result, your customers will remain safe, and they’ll feel more obliged to return to you time and time again.
