Security Essentials for
eCommerce Websites

If you running an online store or you have a client, you will know that ecommerce websites are the major target for hackers. Now Imagine hundreds and thousands of credit cards details and other personal information a typical ecommerce website stores.  That’s what makes these websites, so attractive to hackers.
Here we have highlighted most important security essentials that are necessary for anyone who runs an online business:

Use SSL certificates and ensure PCI compliance

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) is a set of standards that the credit and debit card industry has set for merchants who process online payments. In order to be in compliance, you need to guarantee protection for all the cardholder data and implement strong access control measures. Even if you are using payment gateways, you will be handling customer data and should ensure PCI compliance. The same applies for using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication which is a must to ensure secure communication between your customers and your server

Don’t hang on to customer data

There is no need hold hundreds and thousands of record of your customer, especially when it comes to storing the credit card numbers, CVV number and date of expiry. In fact, Under PCI standards it is forbidden. According to security experts you should regularly purge records of old customers and keep a small amount of data on your servers to process their refunds

Ensure DDOS Protection with Cloud services

Now days distributed denial of service attacks have grown in frequency .In response to that what companies can do is sign up to cloud based services that  simply block any unwanted traffic .Some of the high end services offer managed DNS services to transaction capacity and making it more difficult for DDoS attacks to be successful . For a cloud based DDoS protection to work efficiently you need to send the entire traffic through a good protection service that has scrubbing nodes to filter entire traffic to your website. This in turn will eliminate a substantial cost for companies who try to militate against this attack on their own.

Educate your customers

Encourage your customers to take an active role in protecting their personal data. What you can do is inform them about all the information that you are collect and how you collect that information. Educate them how to spot suspicious behavior on website and then inform you immediately if something goes awry.

Data encryption

If you have an online ecommerce store you need to make sure that standard encryption & hashing techniques should be used while transferring the information form front end to backend to avoid any data breach.
In a nutshell, these are by no means the only steps you should take to make your ecommerce website as secure as possible for your customers, your clients. But yes they do offer a basic checklist: if you’re not taking these important steps mentioned above, your ecommerce website is simply not as secure as you think it is.