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Data security is essential for every business; however, it should be a top priority to e-commerce sites. This is because large amounts of users interact with these sites and they store a lot of sensitive data. Not only do ecommerce sites lose revenues every single day to hackers and fraudsters (an estimated $1.6 billion from 2013 to 2016), but also risk losing their customers’ credit card details, SSNs and other sensitive data.
While no business is immune to phishing scams and hacking attacks, there are things you can do to protect your online business. Below are five top tips for protecting your e-commerce site from hacking and fraud.
1. Trademark Your Name and Logos
The most important tip to protect your online business and brand is to ensure that your business name is clear for use as a trademark. While you may have formed a corporation or LLC with your local Secretary of State, it does not guarantee that your business name is available as a trademark. To ensure you are the rightful owner of the name, you need to register it as a trademark. Trademarking your business name or logo also protects against infringers and copiers who may try to steal your brand.
2. Use A Trusted Ecommerce Platform
Nothing is completely secure online, but using a trusted ecommerce platform can help you get pretty darn close. A good ecommerce provider should meet all six categories of PCI standards. Additionally, it should continuously monitor its platform for security issues and take swift action when a problem is found.
3. Know the Signs of Fraud
There are several tell-tale signs that may indicate you’re dealing with a scammer. Some red flags include contact email addresses that do not match the domain name for the company placing the order, expedited shipping, customers with a shady past, high number of cards being used from the same internet address and companies that use privately hosted or offshore sites.
It is important to understand that spotting one of these behaviors on their own does not necessarily indicate a fraudulent order. However, when you notice several signs at one given time, proceed with caution. To make this easy, you can contract a cybersecurity company to help you identify and mitigate online fraud. FraudWatch International is one of the best companies you may want to consider. The company provides brand protection and cybersecurity detection services through their online website, fraudwatchinternational.com.
4. Keep Your Site Updated
Keeping your platform and software up to date can go a long way in preventing fraud and protecting you from newly discovered vulnerabilities. Hackers love low-hanging fruit like outdated websites and obsolete software. Some even use automated crawlers to identify websites with unpatched applications.
To ensure your online store is protected, keep your platform and backend software updated with the latest patches.
5. Require Strong Passwords
Using strong passwords is the single biggest step an online store can take towards stopping an attack. One way attackers gain access to your site is by use of brute force hack – putting combinations of numbers, letters, and special characters into your login site in an attempt to crack a password. Longer and more complex passwords will make it hard for criminals to breach your store from the front-end. Therefore, have your employees and customers use strong passwords preferably those that have a combination of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.
Following these five tips will help minimize your risk of being hacked. Also, be sure to take care of your security on a day-to-day basis.
Got any brilliant tips that I missed? Feel free to drop a line in the comments section below.
