Six Essential Requirements for a Secure e-Commerce Site

Featured article by Gunjan Tripathi, Independent Technology Author

If you are currently running an e-commerce shopping business, you must know that ecommerce sites are a hotspot for tech crackers and fraudsters. Imagine about the thousands of credit card data and other confidential data resides within an ecommerce stores. This is the reason what makes these websites attracted towards web hackers. You must ensure about the ecommerce website security and restore the system from its vulnerable stage. The tips given below will provide you the most effective methods to protect your data against them. Most of these are simple solutions that anyone can put into practice and must consider it as part of an essential security checksum before opening any e-shop.

1. Penetration Testing: A must have it

In Network security, we often call those “Black Hat Hackers” who hack into computer networks with despicable purpose. When an organization needs to think beyond hackers and for that white hats (ethical computer hacking) is required and Network penetration testing is part of it.

Network Penetration Testing performs the same activities of the Black Hat Hackers just it should be handled within the safe hands. They analyze the network and websites by performing an attack to see if there are any security loopholes. Generally White Hat testers spot out the critical paths in a network’s area and after analyzing all the area, they provide advice on preventing these threats. They fully track the security weaknesses to know exactly how and where the network loopholes can be cracked.

2. PCI compliance and SSL certificates

The (PCI DSS) Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a set of standards that has set certain rules for merchants those who transact payments online. In order to be in conformity, you need to give assurance to cardholder’s confidential data & perform strong access control steps. You must ensure PCI compliance even if you are using payment modules. This also followed while using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which ensures secure communication between your server and customers. All your customers put their trust in any transactions, which they do on your website by ensuring that all the web pages on your website deal with encrypted data.

3. Ensure about Data Storage

Almost in many situations, there is no need to hold on a numbers of records of your customers, particularly when it comes to credit card details, CVV2 ID number and expiration dates. Security geeks says that you should regularly flush out old customer records and keep a little amount of data on your servers to transfer refunds and charge-back amounts. For email and marketing campaigns, you will need a record of person’s name, mail, and contact numbers including addresses of your clients. Therefore, you should also think carefully about how much risky data you amass on your server with the registered customers.

4. Manifold levels of security

The security layers are an essential part to prevent cybercrime. The security layers starts with firewalls, which prevent attackers from gaining access over the network. From there you just need to add layers of security on contact forms and secure passwords for logins, including the search queries. Few multilayer securities are spam filtering, whitelisting (antimalware defense), intrusion detection system, intrusion prevention system. Such layers are few of the best ways to protect against application-level attacks such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections. You can know more about multi-layer security mechanism in computer networks here.

5. Make sure about DDoS protection with cloud-based services

Distributed Denial of Service attacks are growing at a large scale and difficult to resolve. Companies can sign up to cloud-based services that prevent unknown traffic. Some of the high qualities services offer managed DNS services for high transaction capacity that makes it DDoS attack difficult. For cloud-based DDoS protection, you need to apply a good DDoS protection service consists of scrubbing nodes that filter genuine traffic coming back to your site. A cloud computing approach helps us to deliver 100% online business, which amends the ease of access of internet system and the communication between your site and your customers.

6. Regularly patch the system

Do not wait for installation of security patch after it has published. Whether your ecommerce runs on Magento, WordPress, or use any third party platforms like Java, Python, you need to fix a security flaw in each of them. Major Websites that have breached in the past were running old software versions. If your site is not well known that does not mean that it will remain safe. More and more website owners are today becoming victims of fraud, swindle, phishing, and intrusion, so it is important to give some practical tips to secure your e-Commerce Website.

Conclusion

The essential security step that you should take is to make your shopping website more secure as possible for your clients and yourself. If you are not following the above steps then your ecommerce is simply not as secure as it has to be. You can take the opportunity to collect customers’ comments to improve the quality of your site. The knowledge of your business and the type of your customers are the key points that help you to make your business secure.

About Author:

Website | Facebook | Twitter | G+ | Linkedin

Gunjan Tripathi is passionate about technology, web security and the online industry. He has extensive knowledge of content creation for a broad range of digital channels, SEO, copywriting, PPC and other current and evolving trends and technologies. Working in online environment, Gunjan is well versed with digital marketing challenges and different targets trying to complete in aggressive deadlines.