With the increase in internet connectivity, we have seen an exponential increase in start-up ideas around e-commerce businesses. The most successful of which are those who pay due attention to their websites’ security.
The e-commerce industry has been growing significantly over the last few years. This is proved by the fact that e-commerce sales shot up to 4.5 billion from 1.5 billion in just 5 years. Another study shows that the e-commerce industry was responsible for 6.5 billion dollars in sales in the last 3 years, alone.
With all the money and data involved, it’s quite obvious to e-commerce sites to also attract malicious gaze from hackers. In 2014, e-commerce frauds caused over a 2.9 billion dollars loss to e-businesses, and this number has only been increasing since then.
E-commerce sites are trying their best to follow all security measures to avoid cybercrime threats but to little effect. The reason behind this being that they simply don’t know what exactly they are protecting against. Protecting yourself from danger is hard when you don’t know what is endangering you.
Hence, we have listed down a couple of common threats to e-commerce websites that plague the e-commerce niche at present.
If you are running an e-commerce business, it is high time that you identified the possible threats your e-commerce site can face. The following list will give you an insight into the same:
Credit Card Fraud
Credit card frauds have been a part of online transaction frauds since its inception. Financial frauds take place when a hacker uses stolen card details to make a transaction online. These frauds can also send requests to your website for refunds and return a product without authorization of the actual buyer.
Spam, on the other hand, contaminates your posts and pages with links, URLs, content, etc that are irrelevant and uncalled-for. These spam often occur in the comment section where hackers post thousands of comments in an attempt to gain a backlink to their website. Many a time these spammers are affiliates of websites or are replica sellers. In order to earn some extra bucks, they resort to hook or crook to get backlinks. Replica sellers want traction and what better than an already ranking post’s comment box?
This form of attack often emanates via an email message which impersonates a trusted source like bank, institution, a government website, or other official sources. The message frequently includes a link. And a tricky message to get users to click on that link and share the asked information.
Phishing attacks are usually used to gain a foothold in your network as a part of a large attack. Of course, these attacks are also used to extract your personal information and money.
Most of the e-commerce websites store data in a SQL database. Hackers usually raise a malicious query that can lead to the manipulation of information in your database.
The database is where all the information about a website and its users lies. By executing a malicious query, the hacker intends to create a backdoor to get into the website and steal or wipe all the valuable data.
There were three e-commerce security threats that e-commerce is facing today. Though you must understand that these were only the most common attacks. An actual e-commerce threat list is much longer than this. Therefore, to keep such circumstances at bay, several popular e-commerce websites have taken necessary measures. Such steps ensure complete safety and provide exceptional customer experience.
Many successful e-commerce giants including Amazon, Myntra and Flipkart are popular among millions of people who use them every day. So, this makes it necessary for the websites to ensure that those millions of data are safe. To make this possible, the companies follow the following steps to ensure e-commerce security:
The Payment Card Industry (PCI) is a group formed to overlook the activities of e-commerce in regard to security. Till now, the PCI-SS (Payment Card Industry Security Standard) council has formulated really important and reliable guidelines for every e-commerce business to follow, irrespective of their size and capital.
PCI-DDS(Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) ensures that companies are following recommended processes for storing, transacting, and transmitting credit card information. PCI also helps increase e-commerce security and builds their information security programs. It codes the designs to meet their sales requirement.
An efficient web application firewall filters coming traffic to your websites with the utmost accuracy. Firewalls are also a great way to monitor all coming traffic on your website. A firewall-protected website blocks maximum cyberattacks coming its way.
Rock Solid Firewall helps the website like a shield from Spam, Bot and 100+ threats in real-time, giving the user a perspective on when and how their websites are being attacked
An AVS is a system that authenticates a customer’s entered address by matching it with major shipping carriers. With the help of this verification process, one can reduce the number of checkout errors to a great extent and increase the conversion rate simultaneously. AVS can be both domestic and international.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is a crucial form of e-commerce security measure necessary for all online stores. It allows e-commerce websites to keep their customers’ information shielded from attacks.
Adding an SSL certificate puts a lock icon to the web address along with creating an encrypted link. It works to prevent an attacker from listening to traffic.
These blockers are software programs that monitor traffic coming to e-commerce websites. They help in finding certain patterns that lead a bad bot from entering your website. The best way to check that is by having bot protection such as CAPTCHA. Short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. You might have seen pictures like these on websites. That’s CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA
Bots usually can’t tell the difference between a logical question and a question that defies logic or tricks it. Since they are highly automated software executing what the hacker has fed it and not taking decisions on its own. This tells apart a bot from a human attack. Humans are decisive in nature and would go by the logic to check that box and feed those numbers.
These are some of the best e-commerce security measures that you can take to protect your website. So, the next time you want to create and start your website, or maybe visit an e-commerce website, ensure that these measures are followed.