1. Financial frauds
Besides stealing bank cards and account details, cybercriminals have got really creative. Ever since the first online businesses entered the world, villains now target apps and websites.
There are two common frauds that are used to target the e-commerce industry: credit card fraud and fake returns.
- Credit card fraud happens when a criminal uses stolen credit card data to purchase goods or services in an e-commerce store. When payment authorization based solely on passwords and security questions does not verify a person's identification. If someone else obtains our credentials, this might result in a fraud prosecution. This allows the third party to effortlessly take money.
- Fake returns are unauthorized transactions made to false requests for returns. Businesses reimburse unlawfully obtained a merchandise or damaged goods in refund fraud, which is a typical financial scam.
2. Phishing
Phishing is a cybercrime that aims at stealing a user’s confidential data — login and passwords. This is achieved via mass email campaigns run on behalf of popular brands, as well as personal messages inside of the various services like social networks.
Messages often contain a direct link on a fake website that looks exactly like the real one, or on a website that redirects the user somewhere else. When the user lands on a fake page, cybercriminals try to make the user enter his login and password that he uses to access a specific website, which allows villains to get access to bank accounts.
3. Spam
Emails are recognized for being a powerful medium for increasing sales, but they are also one of the most often utilized channels for spamming. Nonetheless, leaving infected URLs in comments on your blog or contact forms is an open invitation for internet spammers to damage you. They frequently send them through your social media inbox and wait for you to click on them. Furthermore, spamming not only compromises the security of your website but also slows it down.
4. Bots
Bots are automated software applications programmed to perform specific tasks. Web crawlers, probably the most known type of bots, are those that define websites’ rankings by systematically browsing all the exiting pages on the internet.
However, there are bots specifically created to crawl websites for their pricing and inventory information. Cybercriminals use this technique to change the pricing of your online store, or to garner the best-selling inventory in shopping carts, resulting in a decline in sales and revenue.
5. DDoS Attacks
DDoS (distributed denial of service) assaults have evolved from a small annoyance that may have caused modest harm to a huge security risk that is easily damaging and shutting down the business continuity of the world's largest and most powerful corporations.
A DDoS assault aims to prevent a company from operating until the attack is effectively prevented or the attacker ceases. These attacks can harm your website or app by generating a large number of requests which eventually can crash the whole system and make it unavailable for the end-user. This eventually disrupts your site and affects sales.
6. Brute Force Attacks
The brute force attack is one of the most common password-cracking techniques. This approach presupposes that a hacker tries to use as many character combinations as possible in order to figure out the correct password.
7. SQL Injections
SQL injection is a cyber-attack aimed at entry your website’s database by targeting your query submission forms. Hackers inject malicious code into your database to read, delete, change, collect or add data.
8. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting is an attack that comes in the form of a piece of browser code script (HTML). When the attacked user opens the browser and the website, the malicious script starts
running and receives access to the various types of user’s sensitive data that must be protected.
9. Trojan horses
Malware, a program usually downloaded by customers as legitimate software, is called a trojan horse. To this category belong programs that can gather data about credit or debit cards, transfer this information to the hacker, as well as crash users’ computers or use PC resources for hacker’s goals without permission of the user. These programs get any sensitive data with ease and may also infect your website.
10. Man in the middle
A cybercriminal may eavesdrop on the communication between a store consultant and a customer. If the client is connected to a vulnerable Wi-Fi or network, hackers can take advantage of that to steal sensitive data.
E-commerce security solutions that can make your life easier
1. HTTPS and SSL certificates
SSL certificate is one of the ways to protect users’ personal data on the internet.
You may have seen that there are two types of browser addresses — HTTP and HTTPS. Both abbreviations stand for communication protocol. The protocol is a set of rules that defines data exchange between browser and server, what kind of information should exist there and what to do with that data.
HTTPS is a protected version of HTTP. It’s an SSL protocol, that gets activated after SSL-certificate is set and encrypts personal data before the information is transferred to the e-commerce website or app owner.
This kind of protection is really useful when you have transactions to be done on your website. Whenever customers enter their credit card information it can be stolen by hackers and used by them later on. Thus, using an SSL certificate will make payments on your website secure and clients won’t be afraid of scams.
2. Anti-malware
Anti-malware is software that detects and deletes computer viruses, as well as other undesirable or harmful programs. Anti-malware also reestablishes files that have already been harmed by viruses and prevents further file or software modification that can be done by malicious code.
Anti-malware is used against worms, viruses, and Trojan horses.
3. Secure server and the admin panel
Using passwords that contain different characters and are hard to guess is a key. You should also change them frequently. Another good practice is restricting user access and defining user roles. Let everyone perform only what they have to on the admin panel. Making the panel notify you if a foreign IP tries to access it is an extra step for your security.
4. Secure payment gateway
Don’t store clients’ credit card information on your database. Alternatively, use Stripe and PayPal as a third party to manage the payment transactions away from your website.
5. Deploy firewall
A firewall is a network security system that controls and filters network traffic (incoming and outgoing) according to defined rules and eliminates e-commerce security threats.
Efficient firewalls protect your website against XSS, SQL injection, and other cyber-attacks.
6. Additional e-commerce security measures
- Tell your clients to use resources that are familiar to them, click on saved links, use the official internet banking app and check out where they get their messages from.
- Make scanning your website from malware your constant routine.
- Increase your data protection by using multi-layer security and backing up your data.
- Use efficient plugins for e-commerce security and update your systems often.
Do you need help with your e-commerce website security?
If you want your business to be safe and sound but lack technical support, a good decision is to partner with a software development company. Please contact our inVerita team, we have experts who will help you to protect your website from e-commerce security issues.
