E-Commerce Security is often not the top priority of store owners. If given an analogy between physical stores and electronic retail stores, people invest into the security of their physical stores in terms of CCTV cameras, alarm systems, door locks and more. This arrangement is made to save yourself from shoplifting. People need to understand that shoplifting, when done in electronic stores is called Hacking.
Hackers steal your customer’s private information such as credit card details, which is in fact equivalent to stealing money from your cash counter.This alone should draw your attention to highly neglected fact of E-commerce security.
Consequences of Compromised E-Commerce Security
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Credit Card Theft
To secure your company from the theft of credit card information you must never store the information for long. It is advised to constantly purge the older information whose payment had been successful and the consumer satisfaction has been achieved. Companies must comply with the PCI compliance which ensures a minimum level of security before a company accepts digital payments. This way you can achieve some substantial (but incomplete) security.
There are various other flaws which often haunt the Payment Gateways, most common being.
- SQL Injection
- Cross-Site Scripting
- Path Traversal
- Session Hijacking
- Malware Infections
Often the site owners come to know about these vulnerabilities late in the timeline, and till then there occur major financial losses.
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Interruption in Business
No one would like to have their stores made unreachable for access to the general public. This type of attack is Denial Of Service attacks where an attacker makes a web page unavailable to the general public. This attack on your website has many consequences most annoying being the
- Revenue Loses
- Degradation of social image of the business – This makes the consumer think about buying from that particular store again.
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Search Engine Results
In today’s market, everyone invests a great deal of money to improve their ranking in search engine results. As a matter of fact, it just takes a single Link Injection or Cross-Site Scripting which vanishes you from the search results altogether.
If your website is being used by attackers to flag some malware then, most widely used search engine Google and many other free plugins alert their users to threat of malware on the site they wish to achieve. Both of the above-mentioned attacks cause severe traffic loss which is equivalent to financial losses.
Steps to ensure security
Absolute security is a myth. But that doesn’t mean we do not try to achieve some threshold of security. It’s all about making it super difficult for hacker/bots to hack you. Security helps us save our business online.
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PCI DSS Compliances
Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI DSS) was made with the purpose of creating an extra level of protection for card issuers making sure that merchants irrespective of them being a physical store or online, at least meet basic levels of security when storing, processing, and transmitting cardholder data.
To set a minimum level of security, the Payment Card Industry set compliance, these are called control objectives, which consist of:
- Build and maintain a secure network
- Protect cardholder data
- Maintain a vulnerability management program
- Implement strong access control measures
- Regularly monitor and test networks
- Maintain an information security policy
Companies that fail to comply with the PCI DSS standards risk losing the ability to process credit card payments and may be subjected to audits and fines. Inability to process to digital payments over your E-commerce is not good for business.
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OWASP top 10 and SANS top 20
These are the two standardizing authorities which give directions on making an application achieve a general yet the important level of security. These documents have been prepared over the years by extensive analysis and research on attack frequency and the impact this vulnerability might have on the system if they are compromised.
Both of these documents i.e. OWASP top 10 and SANS top 20 help people to identify the security issues and address to their need for rectifying the issues, because of these factors developers must use these references to ensure a great deal of security for your E-commerce solutions.
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Denial Of Service Defenders
There are many solutions out in the market for helping you to save yourself from the Distributed Denial of Service attack, one of the best is provided by cloudfare. It is a service provided at the network edge. Cloudfare has successfully mitigated attacks of more than 400 Gbps.
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Astra Firewall
Our plug-n-play firewall Astra secures your store from hackers in real-time. It works seamlessly with all popular CMSs like Magento, WordPress, OpenCart, Prestashop and more. A few reasons why Astra is the perfect choice for e-commerce security:
- Easy to Manage: Astra installs within minutes and does not require complex configurations unlike other security solutions.
- Customized for CMS: We understand that every CMS has different requirements. Astra has been customized to ensure that CMS specific security is provided.
- Does a Lot More: Astra is not just a simple firewall. It keeps an eye on complete health of your website
Shubham Agarwal
[…] for HTTPS encryption – especially if you are an e-commerce website and largely handle sensitive credit card information: On the upside, Google gives you a ranking […]