Top 5 Security Fundamentals for Ecommerce Sites

E-commerce

Ecommerce sites are usually the preferred target for hackers and fraudsters. A person who runs a business online, or has a client who does, will be aware of this. A regular ecommerce site stores thousands of credit card details and other personal information. It does not matter if the website is big or small it draws the attention of criminals to these sites.

If you want to start an ecommerce project, make it a point to first ensure that all the systems are functional. This is mainly to provide maximum security to your website. This article points out the five extremely significant security essentials for anyone who wants to run an online business. The article is derived from conversations with ecommerce and security specialists.

The tips covered in the article highlight the vulnerabilities that are commonly taken advantage of. It provides effective ways to get protection for websites against them. These are easy solutions that anyone can make use of. Everyone should try and include it as part of a “basic” security check while thinking about opening an online retail environment.

Use SSL Certificates and Maintain PCI Compliance

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of standards. It is for merchants involved in the processing of card payments in the credit and debit card industry. If you want to be complaint, you need to ensure to provide guaranteed protection for cardholder data. You also should try and apply strong access control systems, along with other things.

You will be making use of customer data even if you make use of payment gateways. This means that you should adhere to PCI compliance. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication is vital if you want to ensure secure communication between your customers and your server.

Jeff Chandler is a marketing executive at DigiCert which is an SSL certification company. He says that your customers trust you to a greater extent when it comes to performing transactions on your website.
He states that the least you can do to provide protection to customers is make every web page on your site that has to deal with secure data, SSL certified. Ensure that your payment gateway is PCI compliant.

Do Not Be Stuck To Customer Data

Most of the time, it is not required to store thousands of records of customers. This is specifically relevant for credit card numbers, CVV2 numbers and expiration dates. The fact is that this is not permissive under PCI standards.

Security experts highlight that it is best to get rid of old customer records. It is advisable to maintain only a small quantity of data on your servers to process refunds and charge-backs.

Carolyn Brackett is the vice president at CyberSource. It is a company that helps process credit card payments for businesses. She says that you will need to have a proper record. This record should consist of names, emails, phone numbers, and also addresses of your customers for email and marketing campaigns. You need to give a thought to what and how much data you will store considering the risk your customers are going to face.

Include Manifold Layers of Security

Having multiple layers of security is a great way to acquire protection against cybercrime, as per the internet security expert Allen Grayson, an engineer at Symantec.

He asks to begin with firewalls as it will not let attackers gain access to your network. After this, it is best to add layers of security on contact forms, secure passwords for logins, and search queries.

Having numerous layers provides great protection from application-level attacks like cross-site scripting and SQL injections.

Make Sure to Get DDoS Protection with Cloud-Based Services

Distributed Denial of Service attacks are happening quite often and are becoming highly sophisticated. For this, it is best for companies to sign up with cloud-based services that “scrub” unwanted traffic. There are few higher end services that offer managed DNS services. This is with an intention to provide transaction capacity and make it very tough for DDoS attacks to workout.

Richard Elder, chief executive at SwitchVPN, highlights that for the functioning of cloud-based DDoS protection, you will have to send your traffic through a good DDoS protection service. It has scrubbing nodes that sort out genuine traffic back to your site. This can help companies reduce cost who are working on lessening the effects of such common attacks.

Opting for a cloud approach can make it possible to deliver 100% DNS resolution to online businesses. This increases the availability of internet system and the communications between your site and customers.

Install Security Patches on Your System Regularly

Do not wait even for a day to install a security patch after its release. This includes everything from WordPress and Magento updates, to third-party codes like Perl, Java and Python.

Susan Watkins, chief strategist at searchengineoptimisation.org.za, says that most breached sites usually run old versions of software and code.

Watkins states that it is important to install on all software with specific attention to WordPress, Joomla, and other web apps, such as OSCommerce and ZenCart. Usually, these are the main targets for attackers which are why they should be checked often for updates.

Conclusion

These are not the only steps required to make your ecommerce site extremely secure for your customers, your clients and yourself but they do form a basic guideline. Having said this, you need to understand that your ecommerce site is surely not secure if you do not follow the basic five steps.

  • Comments
  • Leave a reply
Xchop blog themes