Major eCommerce Security Threats & Solutions Explained

Spamming

Emails are a large medium for big sales, which makes it a hotshot for inviting spamming too. Apart from that, comments on your blog or contact forms are open invitations for spammers where they injected links. Also, they often send them via social media. Moreover, spamming not only affects your website’s security but also damages your website speed too. As a result, the online shopping experience goes down which brings the revenue down.

Phishing

Phishing techniques include emailing your customers or your team with fake “You must take this action” messages. This technique only works your customers follow through with the action and provide them access to their login information or other personal data which the hacker can exploit as per his benefit.

You simply have no idea what potential your users’ personal information holds. Your eCommerce business goodwill is at the stake of losing reliability in the market if this happens!

DDoS Attacks

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices.

From a high level, a DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination.

SQL Injections

SQL injections are cyber-attacks intended to access your database by targeting your query submission forms. They inject malicious code into your database, collect the data, and then delete it later on.

XSS

Hackers target your website visitors by infecting your online store with maligning the code. Luckily, there are ways to safeguard it. You can safeguard yourself against it by implementing Content Security Policy.

Bots

You may recognize bots from your good books such as those that crawl the web and help you rank your website in Search Engine Result Pages. However, there are exclusive bots developed to scrape websites for their pricing and inventory information. The hackers use such information to change the pricing of your online store, or to garner the best-selling inventory in shopping carts, resulting in a decline in sales and revenue. Sneaky bots, aye?

Switch to HTTPS / Install an SSL Certificate on Your Store website

Since HTTP protocols are gone for good, most of the modern browsers display a message warning the user from proceeding further because the website is insecure. Not just that, some browsers outrightly block the user from accessing the site.

Another benefit you get from upgrading to HTTPS is a higher ranking on Google’s search page since Google considers HTTPS as a ranking factor.

Before you make that switch, you must purchase an SSL certification from your hosting company. Having an up-to-date SSL certificate and HTTPS protocol has become the standard, so it’s crucial that you obtain them if you wish to get any considerable traffic.

Stay Updated

There are numerous reasons to choose Magento for your online eCommerce. Among these, the framework of this platform is of utmost value. It makes the development & maintenance of an eCommerce store simple and scalable. In terms of extensions, Magento offers the most number of extensions in comparison to other eCommerce platforms.

But if you want to ensure the security of your Magento eCommerce store, then you must use the latest version of Magento whether it is Magento Open Source or Magento Commerce.

Get the end-to-end Magento development services from consultation, store design, upgrades, to maintenance and security leveraging experienced Magento eCommerce experts.

Use A Firewall

Another effective eCommerce recommendation is to use firewall software and plugins that are pocket-friendly yet effective. They keep untrusted networks at bay and regulate traffic that enters and leaves your site. It offers selective permeability and only allows trusted traffic in. They also protect against cyber threats such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting.

Malware

Malware is software that is intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer system, network, service, or website. The hackers use it for stealing customers’ personal information, credit card/debit card data, and much more. While some malware is easy to identify by a scan, some are well hidden to detect using the most vigilant web admins. Hence, you must take regular checks using advanced malware detection software.

Payment Gateway Security

Generally, in the ecommerce stores, the domains are set up for handling the online transactions safely. This is carried out by integrating a safe & reputed payment method. However, as the credit card data of users is highly valuable for the attackers, many ecommerce stores fall victim to payment cardholder data theft.

The attacks generally involve unusual system behavior & malware. These all need to consider for defense. In case, the attacker manages to get into the website and extracted the transaction data, then they will store it in a file within the site. They will use this file to harvest data in the long run. Hence, a regular scan of the file system will keep you protected from unprotected credit cardholders.

Disable Directory Indexing

It is difficult for the attackers to access the core files of Magento due to the directory indexing. Just like the strategy of adding a custom path, if you make the directory indexing a lot difficult for the hackers to access, the website will be safe from attacks.

Secure Admin RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are one of the best features of Magento. It is an XML-based data format used for distributing information to users. With this data, the customer will subscribe to your eCommerce store for getting new updates about products or deals. There are RSS feeds to the site admins as well, by which the admin can check new orders, stock availability, & product reviews.

Magento uses a simple authentication box with fields of username & password for preventing hacking. The credentials are similar to the Magento admin pages. After login, Magento will display all the details admin wants to check. If you are using complex username & password then it will increase the security from the brutal attacks of hackers.

Follow Regular Security Updates and Patches

For every business, timely and regular security patches and updates are of utmost importance. Hackers are usually happier in exploiting software vulnerabilities.

By keeping all of your software updated, you can prevent the stealing of valuable customer data. Either for your Magneto, Drupal, or OpenCart eCommerce websites, the security software is available to clean malware and protect data.

You can follow the news to know the latest patches and updates for these services and provide continuous protection to your online customers.

Use Strong Passwords

A password acts as the key to accessing your website. If an online attacker gets it, he/she won’t waste time using it to access your site maliciously.

You don’t want your user data to be stolen; neither do you want to be locked out of your business website. The best way to avoid this is to use strong passwords that are difficult to guess but easy to remember for you.

Experts recommend using tools like free password managers for storing your passwords if you can’t easily remember them. Apart from that, do not save your passwords in the system you’re using.

Some computer viruses can find and steal them if the system is infected. Finally, changing your passwords once in a while is a really good idea to keep things safe.

Use Magento reCAPTCHA

Using the Magento reCAPTCHA is a foolproof way of blocking spam and keeping you safe from attackers. It works by determining if the access session being initiated on your site is done by a Bot or human being to ensure genuine and secure site logins.

Most website owners use it to defend against attacks like dictionary attacks and to ensure that the search engine spiders only crawl essential pages on the site to avoid spam content that can put sensitive data or the database at risk of exploitation by malicious perpetrators.

Backup Your Site Regularly

Although the internet lets you store and connect to clients, it’s never safe. The basic rule of the thumb is to always have a backup in place just in case something goes awry with your site.

Backing up your site will make it super easy to recover your Magento eCommerce store if something happens to it, leading to data loss. You can do this by downloading your site data through an FTP client then backing them up in your account.

Either way, you can also use your phpMyAdmin to export the stored database. After export, you can access this data from the database area under the Pixie control panel. After that, select the database name to view its content.

Use a Unique URL for Admin Dashboard

All Magento websites are designed to have a default my-site.com/admin URL for the admin control panel. Most website owners don’t bother changing this save for the passwords and usernames.

This is a significant risk as it opens more routes for online attackers to launch dangerous attacks on your web store. One best example is the brute force attack, where they try multiple password combinations to get your exact login details and access the admin panel maliciously.

To avoid this, you should use a different name when creating the URL for the admin panel. To do this, you only need to modify the site’s URL for the admin path and give it a name that you can easily remember but is difficult to guess.