Ecommerce Security: Protecting Your Store From Cyberattacks

Online stores, by virtue of their business, deal with sensitive consumer info and payments, making them a common target for data breaches, fraud, and service disruption cyber attacks. Therefore, Ecommerce Security is of extreme importance.

These attacks can result in the loss of customer trust, damage a brand’s reputation, and cause a business significant financial loss. However, taking proactive security measures can prevent loss of customer trust, downtime, and long-term damage to an ecommerce business.

Key Takeaways

• Ecommerce platforms are primary targets for cyber criminals due to the threat posed to customer payment information and sensitive data they manage on a daily basis.
• Incorporating best practices, technology and combined with proactive monitoring are the best way to approach ecommerce security.
• Taking steps to secure your ecommerce site, installing ssl certificates, using secure payment gateways, implementing strong security controls, and accepting regular updates to your site will help to assuage security concerns.
• For trust to be earned and legal/statutory compliance to be achieved, customer data must be protected and their privacy maintained.
• Reliable backup, secure hosting, and continuous threat detection are integral in data loss and downtime prevention.
• Prioritizing ecommerce security fosters customer commitment, ensures business continuity, and drives growth.

What Is Ecommerce Security?

Ecommerce security is the ins and outs of a safe Ecommerce site. It employs various strategies to protect online stores against the various cyber threats that exist. Ecommerce Security protects the online store from unauthorized access, theft, and misuse, ensuring the sensitive data of the store, customers, payments, and transactions remains safe.

Ecommerce website security is a combination of various and multiple methods to ensure a seamless and safe experience for both customers and owners. Also, some of those methods to prevent fraud and hacking include data encryption, secure payment transactions, and limiting user access.

Common Cyber Threats Targeting Ecommerce Stores

eCommerce Cybersecurity has to face multiple industries to protect and prevent loss of information and money from cyber fraud. Cybersecurity has to protect information when computers are infected with malware and ransomware that can keep information and files locked in computers and hold the information for ransom. 

Cybersecurity also has to prevent loss of information from phishing emails and fake websites that are created to try to get owners, employees, or customers to provide passwords or payment information.

Email phishing, cyber fraud, and other social engineering technology has to protect against fake emails and websites. SQL injection hacking and cross-site scripting hacking are other areas of cyber fraud/crime that exploit the weaknesses of other people. Hacking of DDoS and brute force hacking through the use of automation are other layers of hacking. 

eCommerce customers are also at risk of fraud through hacked payment systems of Magecart that keep the credit cards of customers taken during the checkout process. Moreover, losing reputation is as damaging as losing money. This is causing damage to an eCommerce business.

Why Ecommerce Security Is Critical for Online Businesses

Cybercrime offers theft and misuse of sensitive customer payment and financial details. Financial details include trust, which can be ruined, diminishing loyalty. Online fraud, chargebacks, and shutdowns of the cash register are all financial losses that signal the need for compliance. Ignoring industry regulations can lead to fines and legal troubles. Most effective security measures allow for the free flow of customers (without disruption) and provide control over ecommerce services that are in demand.

Essential Ecommerce Security Measures

Watching cybercrime protection cover your cash register is a concern for all online business owners. As a business reputations is everything. Cybercrime protection watch offers assurance that customer profiles will be protected (by limited access), cash inflow will be uninterrupted, and the store will operate without criminal disruptions.

To illustrate the facts, 30% of all online security attacks target e-commerce websites. Offline online businesses that experience a major data breach also go offline. Moreover, the closing of these websites provides an e-commerce business a truly effective means to achieve security.

Use SSL Certificates

SSL Certificates not only secure online transactions but also help win over customers by making them feel safe when sharing sensitive information like login credentials, personal information, and payment details, as the information is encrypted while being transferred. Websites that use HTTPS gain more trust from their visitors and thereby enhance their customer checkout experience.

Secure Payment Gateways

Likely, the use of payment gateways that are compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) makes it certain that payment transactions are processed in line with strict industry security standards. Such gateways handle sensitive card data in a way that diminishes the chance of fraud and data breaches.

Ecommerce stores should avoid, to the extent possible, the practice of storing credit card information on their servers. Additionally, the practice of offloading payment processing to reputable providers significantly diminishes security and compliance risks.

Strong Authentication Practices

Effective practices regarding authentication provide the protection of admin and customer accounts from being accessed by unauthorized persons. The use of unique and complex passwords, as well as the use of password managers, helps to mitigate the risk of credentials being stolen. Two-factor authentication (2FA) also requires a second step of verification to be completed during the sign-in, thereby adding to the protection. This significantly limits the chances of successful brute-force and phishing attacks.

Regular Software Updates

To keep your store secure, updates are necessary for your ecommerce platform, plugins, and themes. They include fixes for security vulnerabilities, which are always attacked by bad actors. The more updates you delay, the more likely breaches will happen because the software is outdated. Additionally, the more your store is at risk, the more important it is to keep applying security patches.

Web Application Firewalls (WAF)

Before malicious traffic gets to your ecommerce store, a web application firewall stops it. They protect you from bad requests, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. WAFs protect you from brute force logins and traffic spikes. Also, they improve speed and increase the security of your website by acting as a barrier.

Protecting Customer Data and Privacy

Ecommerce businesses must abide by strict legal requirements to protect customer data. Encrypting data while stored and during transfers helps protect customer information and transaction history so data cannot be read if unauthorized access occurs.

Data access controls can be put in place in order to limit security breaches and inadvertent leaks. Access to sensitive data privacy, and systems should be restricted to empowered personnel. Additionally, customer account protection strategies like strong passwords, monitoring, and 2FA help to limit unauthorized access. Privacy policies and transparency around customer data collection and protection increase customer trust and demonstrate compliance with legal requirements.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning

Automated backups protect the data in eCommerce systems from being permanently deleted by cyberattacks, crashes, or user mistakes. With backups in place, mission-critical system data can be retrieved during normal operations wirelessly.

Backing up data in additional secure locations is helpful in the event the primary system becomes compromised. Therefore, recovery from cyber incidents is quick with a strong recovery plan in place. This decreases system downtime, optimizes revenue, and ensures operational continuity.

Monitoring and Threat Detection

Threat detection and continuous monitoring are crucial for ecommerce sites to predict and understand issues that can snowball into large breaches. Real-time monitoring systems are able to understand and record activity on the site, patterns, and how the system behaves to swiftly address suspicious behaviors and other outliers.

Examining logs and intrusion detection systems provides more insights for recording all attempts to log in, file adjustments, and logs of document accessibility. Moreover, reviewing logs can highlight and explain instances of unauthorized document access and other attack attempts.

Ecommerce Security Best Practices for Store Owners

The role of store owners is fundamental in establishing the ecommerce security. Educating employees on the dangers of cybersecurity is invaluable in avoiding brute force attacks, compromises by weak credentials, and indirect exposure of sensitive information. Even the simplest training can greatly help in avoiding security losses that are human-originated.

Managing administrator permissions means that in sensitive areas of the store, only the people who need to be in charge of it are. Using safe and secure hosting environments that come with additional security measures is an added benefit. Moreover, keeping records of security checks and testing by intrusion attempts helps businesses take note of the issues that need to be addressed so these issues can be resolved before an attack happens.

Compliance and Legal Considerations

Ecommerce companies face legal issues that affect how customer payment details and sensitive data are handled. For companies that handle credit card information and need to perform secure payment transactions and reduce fraud, there is the Merchants and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance.

Depending on your target audience and location, you may need to comply with data protection laws, including GDPR, which requires you to collect data transparently, store that data securely, and obtain consent to keep that data. From a compliance standpoint, the legal, financial, and reputational risks are substantial, which include losing the trust of your customers and possibly having your payment processor frozen.

How Secure Hosting Improves Ecommerce Security

The type of hosting an ecommerce site uses can determine how well that site is going to be protected from attacks. If an ecommerce site is using a good hosting service that offers separate computing resources, advanced security measures, and stable performance, that site should not suffer from attacks that will affect the store.

A store’s security can also be improved by not having to share hosting with other sites. VPS and dedicated hosting are much more secure than shared hosting. Other than offering a more secure hosting environment, many providers offer the service of having managed security, which includes firewalls, automatic updates, and performs malware scans and backups to help store owners keep the ecommerce site secure.

Final Thoughts on Ecommerce Security

Don’t expect that e-commerce security is a system that you can ‘set and forget’. This is a security system that will require updates and changes to cope with the evolving threats to your system.

For online store owners, the critical steps that can be taken are preventative. Moreover, the more you prepare to face these new threats, the more likely you will keep your system and shop secure.

The assurance e-commerce owners have that their system will not be breached should be actively maintained on their system at all times. Moreover, when system security is put as a priority, the assurance that e-commerce owners will have is that their system will not be breached.

E-commerce security should be invested in if you want your brand to stay the way it is. E-commerce security is an assurance system that is set to maintain your brand will not be breached.

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