9 Ways to Protect E-Commerce Websites from Hackers

Your website is the best way to get leads for your business. Market wrack their brains in finding out the correct marketing mix, but the website occupies a prime place in their plans. A well-planned website will attract more visitors to your website. If you are running an e-commerce site, ensuring it has an attractive UX is of prime importance. You will need to bring in visitors to your website, entice them with an offer and take them to the checkout page.

Of late, this is only the beginning of your worries. E-commerce websites are a primary target of fraudsters and hackers. The global cyber-security market is expected to reach US$ 281 billion by 2027, and this is mostly attributed to the increased adoption of e-commerce. At the same time, Europe's Cyber-security market remained at 36.02 USD billion in 2019.

The risk involved can be estimated when Symantec announced in 2018 that 4800 e-commerce sites were victims of formjacking in a month. E-commerce sites store a lot of demographic and financial information. Any data breach could lead to significant damage to customer trust, along with possible penalties. In this article, we will delve deep into some of the ways by which you can protect your site.

1. Choose your Web Hosting provider carefully

It will help if you choose your hosting provider, judiciously. You need to be judicious while finalizing the deal with them. To start with, you need to check their credentials. Ask for references and enquire whether their clients are satisfied with their services. Do visit their data center and review their security procedures. Also, talk to their IT personnel and, if possible, interview them too. You must also check their backup system and disaster recovery site. To ensure that the web host operates 24X7 with maximum uptime. It would help if you also decided whether to opt for a shared server or a dedicated server.

2. Double-check while choosing the e-commerce platform

While ensuring the security of your site, you must select the platform after considering vulnerability, performance, and customer support. Research the in-built security protocols of the platform you intend to choose. Another aspect you must consider is the availability of patch updates. More often, the platforms will release patch updates to plug any gaps in their code. Also, you must choose secure payment gateways and plugins that will not be an added burden on your site. If you want WordPress as your platform, you have the benefit of some robust security plugins also.

3. You need an SSL certificate

Having an e-commerce site requires you to adhere to the PCI-DSS guidelines. It applies to all websites which store payment data online. Sites need to have processes in place and guarantee the safety of customer financial data. As e-commerce sites mostly have sub-domains, so you need a Wildcard SSL certificate that will allow you to cover your domain and all sub-domains. Moving your website to HTTPS will enable encrypted communication between the web server and the visitor's browser. Your HTTPS site will also help you to be ranked, preferably on Google, making it more necessary to procure a Wildcard SSL.

You can also, refer to this article How to Buy Wildcard SSL Certificates for more detailed information.

4. Periodically update your site

All renowned CMSs provide periodic updates that try to plug in any security vulnerabilities of the earlier versions. Most of the updates are provided free of cost. All you need to do is to activate notifications of such updates on your CMS. Your IT team must keep track of these updates and update the CMS whenever these are available. Having a security plugin will also help you to be notified of these updates periodically.

5. Periodic backups will help

While you are taking steps to secure your site, you must also be prepared just in case the unthinkable happens. You must ensure that your IT team has a robust policy for backups also. Ideally, you must take a weekly backup of the entire site along with incremental daily updates. You must have a replica of your backups stored in another location, just in case the data at the primary location is lost. Having a backup of your site will allow you to recover from a cyber-attack or any natural disaster quickly.

You can also, refer to this article Need of Wildcard SSL Certificate for E-Commerce Websites for more detailed information.

6. A web application firewall is handy

A web application firewall (WAF) will be another layer of security for your website. A WAF helps to prevent DDoS attacks, cross-site scripting, and SQL injections. You can deploy an Application Gateway that opens two lines of communication; one between the web server and the proxy, and the other between the proxy and the destination network. You can also deploy a Proxy Firewall that makes it difficult for cyber-criminals to find your system.

7. Have a robust password policy

Your IT team needs to deploy a robust password policy and the passwords to your network, and the CMS should be random ones with special characters and digits. While most break-ins occur due to someone mistakenly giving out the user credentials. So, the user credentials must be only with a specific group of people. Your employees must be taught about password security periodically and ensure that they do not use their names or birth dates in their passwords.

8. Do not save unnecessary data

It is in your interest not to collect any user demographics or financial data online. You must provide a mobile-generated pin to the customers when they wish to buy anything online. You can also mask the customer data in your database. In this way, even if fraudsters gain access, the data will be of no use to them.

9. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)

It is a network of distributed servers that store your content. The server closest to the user gets access to a cached version of the website. It can also check out for any malware, thereby protecting your site.

You can also, refer to this article How to Verify the Wildcard SSL Certificate for Single Domain for more detailed information.

Wrapping Up

While securing your site does come at a price, it is minuscule compared to the costs you could count if your website is compromised. Wildcard SSL certificates help you to protect your domain and all underlying sub-domains. You must also incorporate the steps mentioned in this article while looking for an optimal solution to protect your site.