Having your website hacked can be a scary experience. Unfortunately, it happens a decent amount to eCommerce sites. That's why eCommerce cybersecurity is so important to your operations. One hack or vulnerability could lead to untold damage to not just your bottom line but also your ability to deliver service to your customers.

In this article, you'll discover seven lessons about eCommerce website security. Follow these best practices, and you can optimize your site's eCommerce cybersecurity and protect eCommerce websites from hacking.

The first thing you'll want to focus on is your immediate surroundings - and more specifically, the devices you use daily. These devices often contain vital passwords and personally identifiable information. It's common for people to treat their computers and smartphones as a substitute for their own consciousness, storing all kinds of valuable data and information there without a second thought.

That's why it's so important to keep those devices secure. If you use a device for work, do everything you can to ensure its safety. Your immediate working environment is the first area on which to concentrate. Cybercriminals steal website credentials with infected cell phones or working PCs. Ensure that your physical devices are secure.

Password theft remains one of the most common techniques used to gain access to your website. Many people look at their password as an annoyance or a nuisance, but often, it can be the only thing standing between your website and the site's corruption. It's often one of the greatest website security tools that protect eCommerce sites from malware.

So what are the best practices you can implement to ensure your password is doing its job and protecting your information? A few recommendations:

• Be smart about how you manage your passwords. Use secure password management systems. Avoid the urge to keep them written down somewhere or kept in a file on your computer. These can be easily accessed, either physically or virtually.
• Develop strong passwords. Build strong, unique passwords with an online generator that aren't easy to guess. It should have symbols, a combination of upper and lower case letters, and numbers. It shouldn't be a word you can find in the dictionary. Common passwords like your birthday, your name, or variations such as "Passw0rd" are like catnip to hackers.
• Update your password every 3-4 months. Variety can also help keep your systems and devices safe. While building a unique password is the best way to ensure success, changing your password every few months can also make your systems harder to break into.

Websites - especially those housed or developed using a content management system (CMS) - are often made up of multiple, independent components. What makes this difficult to manage is that each component may have a different level of security. If any of them have a "zero-day" security vulnerability, you could be susceptible to a hack. It's like the saying about a chain only being as strong as its weakest link.

The way to manage this for eCommerce cybersecurity is to undergo periodic software updates for all components. This should address vulnerabilities across every individual piece of your website. This will decrease the risk of a hack and increase website protection.

That does lead to another question: how do you know if any part of your site has vulnerabilities?

When you manage a website, it's challenging to stay up to date on each and every issue that needs to be addressed. Many of the tools you use may have vulnerabilities based on emerging cybersecurity threats and trends. In the world of hacking, new issues can pop up at any time, so it's crucial to be vigilant in order to protect eCommerce sites from malware. But for someone without any expertise in the world of cybersecurity, that can prove difficult.

That's why you should use tools that allow you to scan for vulnerabilities regularly. Quttera's web application firewall (WAF) gives you virtual patching capability. This means that if a vulnerability isn't repaired in a timely manner, Quttera's firewall rules still protect it from exploitation. You can use this to identify security gaps and weaknesses and then fix them.

Some eCommerce websites receive near-constant hacking attempts by malicious actors looking to gain access to their data. When they gain access to their payment processes, they can infect those modules and steal sensitive payment details. This can put your customers' financial information at significant risk. Beyond exposing your customers, it can also lead to a loss of consumer trust in your website. This can severely tarnish your brand's credibility in the eyes of your customers.

To combat this, you'll want to employ a web application firewall (WAF). Firewall filters and blocks any malicious traffic or attempts to hack your website.

A web application firewall acts as your line of defense against threats to eCommerce cybersecurity. It identifies bad traffic and keeps it out, allowing the good traffic to come through and access your site without disruptions.

HTTP attacks aren't the only kind of attack that can affect your website. You could also be exposed to malware from a variety of sources such as:

• Hacked sibling sites
• Stolen credentials
• Malware infection on the operating system level

To counteract this and protect eCommerce sites from malware, run continuous server-side scans to pinpoint any changes to your file systems. Once you've been alerted to the changes via the scan, you're able to detect and remove the infection, curing your website and maintaining eCommerce cybersecurity.

While having a holistic view of your site's internal operations is helpful, it's also useful to look at it from your customer's point of view from time to time. There's a way you can do that to identify any problems faced by your site's visitors.

Much like an internal scan, an external scan of your website provides you with your end-users' perspective of your website. It alerts you as to whether the website is compromised and if there are any risks associated with visiting the site.

Our malware detection and protection platform, ThreatSign!, provides you with all the required services, including a web application firewall, to secure and protect eCommerce sites from malware and hacker attacks.

Sources

https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/14-popular-web-application-vulnerability-scanners/