eCommerce Security Attacks
When you own and operate an e-commerce site, eCommerce Security Attacks will happen and defending against them is an extremely important aspect of your business venture. Here is what you need to know. When you work hard day in and day out to maintain your site and build rapport with your clientele, you want to be able to sleep easy knowing that you and your customers are protected.
eCommerce Security Attacks
While cybercrime is increasing, and while it is not something to be taken lightly, there are many things that can be done to avoid falling victim. Below is a checklist to determine how secure your e-commerce site is.
- Is your infrastructure secured inside and out?
Firewalls and internal password protection is crucial!
- Are you PCI (Payment Card Industry) Compliant?
Make sure you clients know that you don’t solicit and store personal identifiable information.
- Do you have strong SSL authentication?
This is vital for an e-commerce site. Protection of your customers financials and other personal information while they are in session on your site is extremely important.
- Are you enforcing strong password protection?
The more robust the password you require, the more secure your clients will feel.
- Are you notifying your customers of changes?
Whenever any changes are made to the look/feel/operation of your site, make sure your customers are in the know. The more communication, the better.
- Are you using visual cues?
Putting an icon like a lock next to a password helps to communicate the safety of your site.
If you were able to align your current strategy with the aformentioned tips, you are on track for a secure e-commerce site!
What is are eCommerce Security Attacks?
In e-commerce hosting business, the most common cyber eCommerce Security Attacks are DoS (Denial of Service) and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). The basic type of Denial of Service attack involves flooding the victim’s resource with external communication requests. This overload prevents online store from responding to legitimate traffic, or slows its response so much that it is rendered unavailable. While many large corporations have their share of DDoS attacks, usually the smaller online stores suffer the most – simply because they are unprepared and do not have protection in place.
Why are eCommerce Security Attacks happening?
DoS attacks largely originate from people with a grudge or complaint against a website or company, competitors looking to increase market share by damaging availability and reputation of victim’s store, or criminal elements that systematically extort store owners for ransom. Other attacks are done just for sport, on a hacker’s whim.
DoS vs DDoS
In a DoS attack, one computer or server on a single connection is used to flood a victim’s server with packets to overload the bandwidth and resources. A firewall included in each package we offer is configured to automatically block an IP address with too many requests coming from the same IP and this kind of attacks is easy to stop and rarely a concern.
A DDoS attack uses multiple devices and Internet connections (thousands), often distributed globally into what is referred to as a botnet. A DDoS attack is, therefore, much harder to mitigate because there is no single attacker to defend from, as the victim’s resource will be flooded with requests from many hundreds and thousands of multiple sources and firewall does not know which one to block.
What Should You Do if your store is under eCommerce Security Attacks?
If you are under eCommerce Security Attacks or a DDoS attack, there are 2 things you can do:
1) add more servers to your hosting configuration to handle increased load. This will require a separate database server, load balancer(s), multiple web servers. It may help until attackers push harder which will require even more servers and monthly cost will be in thousands of dollars.
2) an easier and usually more cost effective way is to use DDoS mitigation service. I recently did a research for a client and companies listed below were recommended by users as being effective. There are many others but I found the best reviews for services listed below. Cost of that service starts from $150 per month and goes to $2000+ per month depending on the level of protection and intensity of the attack:
- http://www.cloudflare.com/ddos
- http://stop-ddos.net
- http://www.incapsula.com/tour/ddos-protection
- http://www.prolexic.com/services-dos-and-ddos-mitigation.html
- http://www.neustar.biz/it-security-services
I hope this helps you understand and prevent eCommerce Security Attacks and again, if you do not want to deal with this sort of problems by yourself, we at FinestShops manage your online store and servers like your own dedicated IT department so you and your staff can concentrate on growing your sales and serving your customers. Simply call us at 1(800)675-0162 or email to sales@finestshops.com
To your success!
Anton Pachkine
FinestShops E-Commerce Management
Hosting | Customizations | Design | Marketing
www.finestshops.com | 1-800-675-0162
