Creating an e-commerce website these days comes at a cost. You need to protect your website from hackers or fraudsters, or else precious data can be stolen from your website harming customer relations as well as causing trust issues and reputation downfall. Luckily you don’t need to break your head into thinking what you need to do to protect your website if we are there. We are here to make your task easy. Here are a few simple steps that will help you protect your website without you having to ponder over it.
Use SSL certificates
Most of those people who own websites admit that SSL certificates are one of the best ways to keep your website away from hackers and security threats. Also, SSL certificates don’t even burn a huge hole in your pocket. If you need the highest authentication, then EV SSL is also the best option. You can search for the lowest price SSL, as there are multiple choices available in the SSL industry. One of the reputed and lowest cost SSL providers naming SSL2BUY has a varied range of SSL certificates. These SSL certificates are affordable, and if you want to secure your website, then you can get cheap SSL from SSL2BUY easily with superior customer support. The price is reasonable and in addition, lets the protection of your website be taken care of by them.
Strong Passwords
A lot of users mess up their security by using common passwords like 123456, password, qwerty, 11111, abc123, and qwertyuiop to make it easy for them to remember. Consequently, this becomes easier for hackers to guess their password as well by randomly using a combination of letters and numbers to attack the website. So have your customers create strong passwords like a combination of numbers, symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters, etc. Random and long passwords become difficult to decode by hackers. Also, for security purposes have the customers change their passwords every 7 or 8 months.
Don’t keep your customers data for a long time
According to PCI standards, it is forbidden to keep your customers’ sensitive data for a long time. This makes sense since there is no need to keep thousands of customers personal information as well as sensitive data such as CVV number, credit card numbers, expiration date, etc. You should only have a small amount of data that too only for processing refund. Keeping information for a long time puts the website and the customers’ data under the risk of attack by hackers.
Heavy security
According to cyber experts, having multiple layers or systems for security helps curbs hackers from attacking by a great margin. You can add firewalls and VPNs to stop hackers from accessing your website and all its information. You can also use website security tools. They are free of cost and protect your site at all costs. Some examples are
- Netsparker (Free community edition and trial version)
- OpenVAS
- SecurityHeaders.io
- Xenotix XSS Exploit Framework (A tool from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) that includes a huge selection of XSS attack examples, which you can run to quickly confirm whether your site inputs are vulnerable to attack in Chrome, Firefox, and IE)
Updated software
You need to ensure that all your software has been updated to avoid any loops, holes, or breaches in your website. Most of the website networks work all year round 24/7 to plug in all holes in their systems and release regular updates to make their sites less vulnerable to attack by hackers. You should run such updates and have the latest version supporting your site at any given point of time. If your website uses third party plugins, keep track of their updates and if not updated, then ensure that they are updated on time. If you have unused, old or outdated plugins, make sure you remove them on time as hackers can use them and destroy your website for once and for all.
Hide admin directories
What is the best way for hackers to attack your site’s data? Go to the heart of it. According to a recent survey, most of the hackers go straight for the heart of the source to access all sorts of information i.e., the admin directories. Hackers have all sorts of techniques and run multiple scripts to find names such as admin, login and many such similar names to find the admin directory. The solution is to use absurd or undecidable names for your admin directories so that the hackers don’t get even a hint of your admin directories name.
Limit File uploads
File uploads are a major concern for websites. No matter how many system checks you do, bugs can still get in and allow hackers to have unlimited access to all your websites data. The solution is that you prevent direct access to the file uploads. Store them instead in a root directory and use a script to access them whenever and wherever you want.
Multiple backups
Backups, backups, and backups. Have a backup of everything. Have a backup on site, backup off-site, in fact, back up everything on a regular interval. Every time a user saves anything from your website, have it automatically backed up in various locations. You can’t just back up once you need to back up multiple times.
Shield your website against SQL injection
A SQL injection attack is when an attacker uses a URL parameter to manipulate your database and gain access to all the information on your site. To stop this, you need to use a parameter query which is simple to implement.
A common query looks like this
SELECT * FROM table WHERE column – ‘ “ + parameter + “ ‘ ; “
To prevent an attack, you just need to parameterize this query so that the query looks something like this:
$stmt = $pdo->prepare(‘SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = :value’); $stmt->execute(array(‘value’ => $parameter));
At last
Opening an eCommerce website is one thing, maintaining and protecting it and its data is a different ball game altogether. So be sure to follow the above steps, and you will surely be able to keep those cyber crooks off your website and away from sensitive data linked to your website. You can also check out ippei.com for more e-commerce success tips.
