Having an e-commerce website can have its fair share of risks these days.
However, as a site owner who handles online payments, it’s even more important to understand these risks and the best methods to prevent them from affecting not only your business, but also your customers.
Here we will discuss the main aspects that are important for an e-commerce website, the types of vulnerabilities that can impact your business, and how to take better preventive measures.
Why SSL Certificates Are Not Enough
An SSL certificate is one of the most crucial things for any e-commerce website to have, but it’s not the “end of everything”. They are set up to only encrypt data in transit, but they have no impact on the actual security of the origin server.
That’s not to say SSL certificates aren’t useful, as they play a vital role in terms of an e-commerce site’s trustworthiness, as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings.
Installing an SSL certificate should be the first step to ensuring your e-commerce site is PCI compliant, which we’ll discuss in more detail in a moment. When configuring the site to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, it is important to understand that this is only one piece of the puzzle, however.
Depending on the size of your online business, there are several types of SSL certificates available and one may suit your needs better than another. For example, if you have multiple subdomains, a wildcard SSL certificate would be recommended. For small businesses, however, a domain validating SSL should suffice.
PCI Compliance
If you allow credit card payments, PCI data security standards (PCI-DSS) is a requirement.
Suppose, for example, that a customer’s card information that was used on your website is hacked and stolen, you are now held responsible.
The results can range from penalties, hefty fines, or the loss of the ability to accept credit card payments. On the dark web, credit cards are commonly bought and sold, so e-commerce sites are the main target of these attacks.
If you’re unfamiliar with what PCI compliance entails, don’t worry, as we’ve provided a handy guide. guide review the list of requirements to make sure your e-commerce website is in tip-top shape.
E-commerce vulnerabilities
When it comes to an online store, it is crucial to be aware of any new vulnerabilities that may arise.
There are a multitude of threats, but one of the biggest concerns in e-commerce is web skimmers. Skimmers are often injected into a site through vulnerabilities and can steal customers’ credit card information.
When these infections occur on e-commerce sites, it seriously damages their brand and online reputation. For example, here is malware injected into a Magento 2.x site found by one of our security analysts, Keith P.
How to Strengthen and Protect Ecommerce Sites
Being proactive against the risks of potential exploits should be at the forefront of any e-commerce site owner’s mind. If a site owner doesn’t have enough time to manually manage a website maintenance scheduleusing a web application firewall (WAF) can be less complicated.
A WAF includes hardening, limiting login attempts, allowlists/blocklists for IP addresses, among many other important features for eCommerce type sites.
Installing a security analyzer for your website will also help detect any questionable changes made, as well as detect any outdated software. Ensuring that updates are installed regularly will help mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities emerging.
For example, if an update breaks the site, however, keeping backups automatically stored within a certain time that you can return to is very convenient.
When it comes to managing accounts with your e-commerce website, you want to make sure you follow good security practices.
By using the Principle of least privilege is important because some user accounts that could be hacked don’t need to have full access to everything on the back-end. Using some form of 2FA with an authenticator app or SMS will also add an extra layer of security.
Adding CAPTCHA to all login pages and limiting login attempts will reduce the chances of being Brute Forced, as well as using non-standard URLs.
Conclusion
As you may know by now, building an online business versus a physical store has its fair share of pros and cons.
This article will hopefully shed some light on the factors to consider when setting up an eCommerce store. If you think your eCommerce site has been the victim of an attack, do not hesitate to have it cleaned as soon as possible.
The longer an infection persists, the more potential it has to spread and ruin your brand’s online reputation. Our security analysts will be happy to take care of it for you.