7 Ways to Secure Your E-Commerce Website and Keep Hackers at Bay
You must be gearing up for handling the traffic at your e-commerce website this holiday season but have you secured your website from cyber criminals? Hackers would definitely seek opportunities to steal sensitive information from your e-store during this festive rush. Therefore, check out these proven strategies to protect your e-commerce website from cyberattacks.
Test your e-commerce site for vulnerabilities
You need to test your e-commerce site to combat hacking and protecting your site from any damage. Conduct regular scanning to ensure that hackers have not introduced malware into graphics, advertisements or any other content provided by third parties. Also consider penetration testing by hiring cybersecurity consultants in order to identify vulnerabilities in the code. By implementing security applications or web app scanning tools try to identify vulnerabilities inside debug code and leftover source code which may put your confidential data at risk.
Do not store sensitive data
According to PCI Standards, it is strictly forbidden to store credit card numbers, expiration dates and CVV2 (Card Verification Value) codes of your customers through your e-commerce solution. Purge old records of customers’ personal data from your database because you won’t be robbed if you have nothing one can steal. E-commerce Development Experts, conversant with security best practices, recommend using an encrypted checkout tunnel so that even your own servers are unable to see your customer’s credit card data. Although it would cause slight inconvenience on the part of your customers but they would be happy with it rather than compromising their credit card information.
Ensure PCI compliance and use a secure connection for checkout
Authenticate the identity of your business by integrating the stronger EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer), green address/URL bar and SSL security seal. This would imbibe a greater sense of trust in your customers and they would feel safe to carry out online transactions on your e-commerce website. You can go an extra mile by using a payment gateway that uses live address verification service right at the checkout. By comparing address entered online to that which your customers have registered with their credit card company, you can prevent fraudulent purchases.
Have a DDoS mitigation service in place
As Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are getting more frequent and sophisticated these days, you should opt for a cloud-based DDoS protection and managed DNS services. Being cloud-based, it will trim operational costs and at the same time thwart even the most complex attacks. Furthermore, cloud-based and managed DNS hosting service would deliver a complete DNS solution and improve the internet-based systems that facilitate online communications and transactions.
Patch your systems regularly
Whichever e-commerce platforms you are using, just get in touch with your E-commerce Development Consultancy to patch everything as soon as a new version is released. This is because it has been constantly found that breached sites were using older version of the software. Therefore, it is quite crucial that you install patches on all the softwares you are using in your e-commerce website, including third-party add-ons.
Add extra layers of security
Layering your security is one of the best ways to keep your e-commerce website safe from cyber attackers. Consider incorporating firewalls to stop cyber criminals from gaining access to critical information from your site by network breach. To ensure that your e-store is protected from application-level attacks like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Structured Query Language (SQL) consider adding extra layers of security to your website such as login boxes, search queries, contact forms, etc.
Implement data back-up plan
Make sure your web hosting service provider has a disaster recovery plan or they are regularly backing up your data. Otherwise you would need to back it up regularly to ensure proper protection of your e-commerce site. E-commerce specialists suggest that having gaps in your data backup will put you in risk of losing valuable business information in case of virus attacks, even power outage or hard drive failure.
Now that you know about the vulnerabilities an e-commerce website can have, get Enhanced E-commerce Development Solutions from a renowned E-commerce Development Company to protect your e-store from hacking and other cyber crimes.
