by Alexandra
With more than a quarter of the world's population becoming digital buyers and the total worth of retail eCommerce sales is expected to reach $4.13 trillion in 2020, it is time to take the security of your eCommerce website way more seriously.
It is found that security threats happen 2,244 times a day on average with an attack happening every 39 second, in a research conducted by the University of Maryland. It is also stated that eCommerce websites and others- without SSL certificates are most vulnerable to these attacks estimated to account for $150 million in 2020 alone.
Contents
That being the case, are you doing whatever it takes to keep your website secured and the interests of your customers protected?
If you are doing it, it is imperative to ensure that you are doing it the right way.
Hence, here is an essential security checklist to make certain that you are ahead of the curve.
An SSL is one of the most important aspects of website security. A digital certificate, SSL is responsible for encrypting the data communication between a web server and a browser.
Due to the very nature of the encryption, which is hard to crack, SSL certificates are regarded an important element of website data security, especially in the realm of eCommerce business.
There is no doubt, hackers are always after the information and data shared by a customer, among many other things. Hence, buy SSL certificate is essential to not only protect data shared onto your website but also in bolstering the confidence of your customers in doing business with you.
Customer trust, as you know, is really crucial for your website's success.
Protecting your site through a WAF or Web Application Firewall is crucial to considerably up the ante of the security measures of your website.
The system functions as a firewall that allows only authorized traffic to your website sieving and wedging out potential, harmful traffic from accessing your network.
Such a system is essential to save your network from such attacks as DDoS Attacks, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injections.
Having a robust, expansive and comprehensive firewall can help you do extremely good against such attacks, period.
While it may be your customers that notice your site has a malware warning, it is important that you keep a keen eye for such things on your website, too.
Therefore, you must have a trusted, updated and advanced malware protection for your website to keep these miscreants away. As these are hard to detect and often operate under cover, you will have a hard time finding them.
Hence it is better to keep them at bay than trying to purge them off from your site as you will have no idea what they might already have done to your website.
A simple and the most effective way to ensure that customer's data is not exposed and vulnerable to attacks is to not keep them.
Have an intelligent system that can get rid of old customer details as soon as possible. Work to create an arrangement that will help you effectively reduce the amount of customer data you have with you. Keep only those details that you need for packaging, refunds, charge back and credits.
Everything else is potential risk for you, your business and the customers.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard or PCI DSS contains a plethora of security benchmarks and guidelines that a website must comply with to process card payments on the site. One of the most hacked and abused customer data is the payment information customers share onto websites when they make a purchase on ecommerce websites.
Since card payments are the most preferred payment type, it is markedly imperative that you keep your website PIC DSS compliant at all times.
You also need to look for any changes happening in the field to ensure continued compliance
Another important thing that must be included in your essential eCommerce security checklist is taking your site's back up.
Taking back up in a meticulous way can help you recover from any attacks if they happen. The recovery from a cyber attack is as much important for a business as having the systems and protocols in place to be secure from the same.
You must also run test restores in an offline ecosystem to make sure that the restored site functions as intended, as well.
Choosing a trusted and secure hosting service and an equally impressive ecommerce platform is fundamental to ensuring the safety of the website, the data stored on the same and the details shared by the customers to the site.
Having an exceptional hosting service and eCommerce platform known and respected for their security features and systems in place to offer an excellent forte of security will surely make your job all the more convenient and easier.
eCommerce Platforms for Small Business
This should be the priority when you start thinking about intercepting your eCommerce business. And if you are late, you can also migrate to other platforms and hosting services.
While that's really hard and painstaking, nothing hurts as much as a cyber attack can.
Every business wants to improve traffic to the website. The more the traffic, the better-it is said.
However, nearly 50% of the web traffic is bots. Bot-traffic is something no website wants as around 30% of all online frauds point towards bad bots. A sudden surge in your website traffic can be a bot attack. However, you can surely turn the ship around if you have a bot-detection system installed on your website to detect bots real time.
As such, you have not included this in your checklist, it is time you did.
All of us are living in a time when cyber threats are more common. With advanced security systems come more threats and challenges.
As we can only prepare for the challenges that security compromises can bring, it is imperative that you keep these in your checklist to keep them implemented, updated and working.
Prevention is ultimately better than cure, always!
About Alexandra
Content creation is my passion and profession. I am an avid reader which basically inspired me to get into writing. I love to read and know about almost everything under the Sun. Apart from spending time writing and reading, I love exploring new places and getting to know different cultures.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
SimplyCleaver