Ecommerce websites are increasingly being targeted by malicious software as cyber criminals have realized the potential of this growing industry. The non-stop innovation in ecommerce business has led to expansion of the online market and has changed consumer purchase patterns. The rise in online retailers has lured thousands of customers, old and new alike to spend money online. Consequently, there are millions of transactions on ecommerce websites every day. But with this massive adoption of ecommerce platforms, ecommerce websites get exposed to cyber attacks from hackers resulting in losses amounting to billions of dollars each year globally. However, there are security software for ecommerce websites (like SiteLock) that can offer protection against such attacks.
When you’re setting up an ecommerce website, you have to be concerned about security. One of the reasons is because your website could be attacked by malicious hackers who want to steal your customer’s information and get access to their online accounts. Even if this doesn’t happen, customers will leave your site if they think their information is not secure.
No one wants to think about something bad happening to their e-commerce business. That’s why people who build e-commerce websites often overlook the importance of security software for ecommerce websites. Cyber attacks happen all too frequently, and can be devastating for a small business just starting out or an established brand with loyal customers.
The eCommerce giants, such as Amazon, eBay, or Alibaba, are aware of the importance of having consumers’ trust. That’s why they invest millions of dollars in strengthening their sites’ security and maintaining the trust of their customers.
What is eCommerce security?
eCommerce security is the guidelines that ensure safe transaction through the internet. It consists of protocols that safeguard people who engage in online selling and buying of goods and services. You need to gain your customers’ trust by putting in place eCommerce security basics. Such basics include:
- Privacy
- Integrity
- Authentication
- Non-repudiation
1. Privacy
Privacy includes preventing any activity that will lead to the sharing of customers’ data with unauthorized third parties. Apart from the online seller that a customer has chosen, no one else should access their personal information and account details.
A breach of confidentiality occurs when sellers let others have access to such information. An online business should put in place at least a necessary minimum of anti-virus, firewall, encryption, and other data protection. It will go a long way in protecting credit card and bank details of clients.
2. Integrity
Integrity is another crucial concept of eCommerce Security. It means ensuring that any information that customers have shared online remains unaltered. The principle states that the online business is utilizing the customers’ information as given, without changing anything. Altering any part of the data causes the buyer to lose confidence in the security and integrity of the online enterprise.
3. Authentication
The principle of authentication in eCommerce security requires that both the seller and the buyer should be real. They should be who they say they are. The business should prove that it is real, deals with genuine items or services, and delivers what it promises. The clients should also give their proof of identity to make the seller feel secure about the online transactions. It is possible to ensure authentication and identification. If you are unable to do so, hiring an expert will help a lot. Among the standard solutions include client logins information and credit card PINs.
4. Non-repudiation
Repudiation means denial. Therefore, non-repudiation is a legal principle that instructs players not to deny their actions in a transaction. The business and the buyer should follow through on the transaction part that they initiated. eCommerce can feel less safe since it occurs in cyberspace with no live video. Non-repudiation gives eCommerce security another layer. It confirms that the communication that occurred between the two players indeed reached the recipients. Therefore, a party in that particular transaction cannot deny a signature, email, or a purchase.
Risks and how to avoid them
Ecommerce sites are exposed to the same threats as any other website: phishing, password stealing, social engineering, bots, spam, and the list goes on. But some threats put customer information and money at risk, and those are the ones that eCommerce website owners should focus on. That’s why an eCommerce WAF solution should be specially engineered to avoid putting customers’ information at risk at all costs.
The threat that eCommerce website owners should be more concerned about is transaction fraud, mainly stolen credit card information and transaction interruption or redirection. Fortunately, there’s a solution, called the Payment Card Industry and Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), that’s designed to give customers a sufficient level of online payment security.
Consumers have a wealth of options when shopping online and will not hesitate to leave their preferred store if it does not show security. That’s why every online merchant should meet the PCI-DSS standards to achieve credibility and protect their customers’ transactions.
The PCI-DSS standards mainly ensure two concerns: the secure storage of credit card data and the secure transmission of that data across public networks.
The first concern applies only to companies that store credit card data, which is not the case for most eCommerce websites that use payment gateways to receive online payments. But if an eCommerce website stores its customers’ credit card information, that information should be safely encrypted to keep cybercriminals from getting access to it.
The second concern involves transmitting sensitive data, such as PINs, passwords, and security codes across public networks. The PCI-DSS standards state that sensitive information should also be encrypted when in transit to protect customers from breaches and identity theft. To learn more about the PCI-DSS standards, go to the PCI Security Standards Council page.
Let’s check some of the best eCommerce firewall solutions that help small and medium-sized eCommerce websites reach PCI-DSS compliance.
Sucuri
Sucuri’s Ecommerce Website Security is a complete solution that helps maintain the customer trust, brand reputation, and revenue stream of your eCommerce website by improving its security posture. The solution takes care of the overall security status of all your software and hardware assets, services, networks, and information.
A key part of the solution is Sucuri Firewall, based on Sucuri’s proprietary virtual patch and hardening technology, which qualifies Sucuri as a Level 1 PCI Compliant Service Provider. The firewall, which is the first requirement of PCI compliance, does its job by surrounding your website with a tight defense system.
Sucuri’s solution also includes an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that avoids all kinds of website security incidents, especially data breaches. The system maintains the security of any credit card data that passes through its channels, keeping it in compliance with PCI-DSS standards. Your customer data will be encrypted and secured in transit, thanks to free SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt. Or if you have your own certificates, Sucuri supports them too.
Sucuri works with the most popular eCommerce platforms, including Woocommerce, Magento, Shopify, Zencart, and many more.
Astra
Astra’s Ecommerce Suite is an all-in-one solution that replaces all security tools and services, from free plugins to expensive security agencies. For e-stores, Astra guarantees 100% safe checkouts, stopping all the bad traffic and making sure your website is secure from all sorts of malware.
A key part of Astra Ecommerce Suite is its Intelligent Firewall, which protects your website from XSS, SQLi, spam, bad bots, and 100 more threats. It makes sure that only real users get access to your website.
Astra’s automatic, machine learning-powered Malware Scanner is another of the main features of its security suite. It is available 24/7, letting you scan your site for malicious objects whenever you want. Scheduled scans can run daily, weekly, or monthly, and the results will appear in your dashboard, together with a detail of flagged files and suggested cleaning actions.
With Astra, you can protect the most sensitive data of your e-commerce website with state-of-the-art security in less than 5 minutes. Forget about complicated setup processes and filling long forms with endless fields: Astra offers human help and comprehensive guidance on every step of an already simple setup process.
SiteLock
SiteLock offers an affordable solution to keep your business and your reputation safe from cyberattacks. Its main goal is to protect your most important asset: your customers. The solution is designed to detect any malicious or suspicious activity on your eCommerce website before anything bad happens by monitoring it and blocking all threats. With automated alert emails and a real-time security dashboard, SiteLock keeps you constantly updated on your eCommerce website’s security.
Online shoppers feel safer if they see a trust seal on your site. For your business, that translates directly into more conversions. SiteLock’s website scanner lets you showcase the SiteLock Trust Seal on your site to instill your customers’ confidence. But it’s not just a badge; SiteLock’s eCommerce protection is also PCI-compliant, which means you can feel safe that your customers’ payment data will stay out of the reach of cybercriminals.
To keep your security measures up to date, SiteLock adds to its solution the Infinity automated vulnerability patching technology, which automatically patches all your CMS vulnerabilities. It also removes malware in WordPress databases and provides 24/7 access to SiteLock’s engineers.
SiteLock solutions not only protect your business but are also designed to improve your website performance and enhance your SEO strategy with malware removal. By leveraging a content delivery network (CDN), SiteLock increases your site speed up to 50%.
Cloudflare
By leveraging its robust, cloud-based network, Cloudflare offers a suite of solutions that improve any self-hosted eCommerce website’s security and minimize its exposure to fraudulent activities. Cloudflare’s suite includes a web application firewall that blocks SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks.
It also encrypts all customer transactions and sensitive data with TLS 1.3, helping with the PCI-DSS certification process.
It’s critical to keep your eCommerce website safe from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks during seasonal shopping events, which can easily be mistaken for expected spikes in traffic. Cloudflare for Ecommerce solution prevents outages due to large-scale DDoS attacks and mitigates traffic spikes to prevent your infrastructure from being overloaded. It also offers load balancing to distribute traffic in case of a server outage.
In addition to keeping your eCommerce safe from cybercriminals and fraudulent activities, Cloudflare’s solution also aims to increase buyer engagement by allowing you to leverage rich media and personalization without increasing page load times. It is widely accepted that high-quality images and videos help you showcase your brand and products; Cloudflare helps in that matter by caching content to minimize latency, compressing image files for faster load times, resizing images on the fly for mobile devices, and streaming product videos.
When you consider a comprehensive eCommerce website security solution, you should pay attention to the hidden costs. Cloudflare offers to reduce them by improving operational efficiencies and increasing profitability. This is done by applying some of its features, such as serving static content, reducing bandwidth usage, securing website domain registration with no add-on fees, and increasing developer agility with a native API architecture.
Sqreen
Sqreen is a security solution designed to help e-commerce organizations of all sizes strengthen their application security and decrease security incidents. And if incidents do occur, it helps resolve them as quickly as possible.
The Sqreen platform proposes a holistic protection scheme that combines HTTP and application-level security tokens to maximize efficiency in detecting and blocking attacks. With Sqreen, you can block the top 10 attack types in the OWASP classification. These include SQL injection, Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), and Cross-Site Scripting.
Unlike traditional, static pattern-based approaches, Sqreen analyzes application execution logic in real-time to provide stronger security with almost no impact on performance figures. Security engineers can extend protection and visibility across their entire application portfolio, reducing the need for maintenance efforts.
Update: Sqreen has since been acquired by Datadog.
With Sqreen, deployment time is a matter of minutes. Its micro-agents spread throughout any architecture, while Smart Stack Detection automatically optimizes its configuration. You don’t have to worry about manual configurations when your application stack evolves since Sqreen protections are continually adapting to it.
Common Ecommerce Security Issues
1. Lack of trust in the privacy and eCommerce security
Businesses that run eCommerce operations experience several security risks, such as:
- Counterfeit sites– hackers can easily create fake versions of legitimate websites without incurring any costs. Therefore, the affected company may suffer severe damage to its reputations and valuations.
- Malicious alterations to websites– some fraudsters change the content of a website. Their goal is usually to either divert traffic to a competing website or destroy the affected company’s reputation.
- Theft of clients’ data– The eCommerce industry is full of cases where criminals have stolen the information about inventory data, personal information of customers, such as addresses and credit card details.
- Damages to networks of computers– attackers may damage a company’s online store using worm or viruses attacks.
- Denial of service– some hackers prevent legit users from using the online store, causing a reduction in its functioning.
- Fraudulent access to sensitive data– attackers can get intellectual property and steal, destroy, or change it to suit their malicious goals.
2. Malware, viruses, and online frauds
these issues cause losses in finances, market shares, and reputations. Additionally, the clients may open criminal charges against the company. Hackers can use worms, viruses, Trojan horses, and other malicious programs to infect computers and computers in many different ways. Worms and viruses invade the systems, multiply, and spread. Some hackers may hide Trojan horses in fake software, and start infections once the users download the software. These fraudulent programs may:
- hijack the systems of computers
- erase all data
- block data access
- forward malicious links to clients and other computers in the network.
3. Uncertainty and complexity in online transactions
Online buyers face uncertainty and complexity during critical transaction activities. Such activities include payment, dispute resolution, and delivery. During those points, they are likely to fall into the hands of fraudsters.
Businesses have improved their transparency levels, such as clearly stating the point of contact when a problem occurs. However, such measures often fail to disclose fully the collection and usage of personal data.
CONCLUSION
Online shopping is a great way for you to easily purchase products without having to leave home. But buying things online can be risky. You might not get what you paid for or the website might keep your money and you won’t ever receive the item. It’s bad news all around.
Ecommerce is booming. It’s estimated that in less than a decade it will be a 50 Billion dollar industry. With more than 3 Million ecommerce websites, comes more cyber criminals and hackers. I mean, think about it: if you had access to millions of credit cards, what would you do with them? While the technology is advancing, so are the cyber threats. If your business is online, your website can come under attack from many different angles. The good news is there are ecommerce security solutions and tips to help you minimize risks, comply with regulations and ultimately protect your brand and customers from these attacks.