10 Cybersecurity Tips for eCommerce Businesses

Whenever you run a big business or own a small online store, ensuring its resilience should be one of your major priorities. According to recent research, the total costs of cybersecurity expenses incurred from attackers show a significant increase today: to recover from the attacks and defend their businesses, various companies worldwide are expected to spend $10.5 trillion by 2025 annually, which is nearly 3 times more than they did in 2015. The average total cost of a data breach in the U.S. has also increased from $8.64 million in 2020 to $9.05 million in 2021.  

Moreover, Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study has uncovered that 43% of cyber attacks are targeted at small businesses, but only 14% of those are fully ready for defense. In general, hacking attacks now become more targeted and occur far more frequently, and because of the insufficient security measures can easily hit different businesses within various scopes. However, by understanding the cybersecurity basics, business leaders can gain more value in cybersecurity efforts, significantly reduce the risks of being attacked and even prevent some of those attacks as well. 

In this article, we’ll introduce the most essential tips that can improve the resilience level of your eCommerce site and make it less vulnerable to new hacking attacks. 

10 Cybersecurity Precautions to Use for eCommerce Business Today

Security precautions are essential for the successful performance of any eCommerce business, as they help to ensure an accurate product or service delivery, provide first-class customer service and improve the site’s security as well. So, what are the basic aspects to consider once you’ve started running your eCommerce store?

#1 Make Regular Client Data Backups

Regardless of their size, all businesses deal with tons of business-critical data every day, including customer details, order information and comments, payment details, and many more. Nevertheless, such data is also considered to be one of the major targets cybercriminals intend to attack: not only does it hit the business financially but also impacts the customer service and the entire performance of eCommerce as well. 

How can you ensure a successful business operation when a data breach occurred? Of course, by regularly conducting the client data backups! Here are some key things to consider when backing up your data for eCommerce business:

• Identify the most critical data that should be backed up (client information, payment details, etc)
• Keep it separately from the working equipment by uploading it on a USB stick, separate drive, or computer; and consider backup to multiple locations to eliminate the chances of losing all the copies at a time
• Consider using the cloud drive solutions to separate your data physically and ensure its secure storage and use
• Conduct regular data backups to always keep the information stored up-to-date, or ensure they’re done automatically

#2 Ensure the Anti-DDos Protection

Distributed Denial of Service, also known as DDoS, is a malicious attack where cybercriminals flood a network with so much malicious traffic that it cannot operate or communicate as it normally would. Only during 2020, there 152,500 DDoS attacks were detected, and the most recent surveys show that more than one-third of all businesses in the US had experienced DDoS attacks at least once, with millions of eCommerce sites being put at risk.

For attacks like this, remember, prevention is always cheaper and much easier than recovery. So, to prevent the DDoS from happening to you, implement the sound network monitoring tools, set up the traffic thresholds, and regularly update the security infrastructure. Also, keep yourself in a loop of the latest security hygiene practices and make up a straightforward algorithm of response in cases when a DDoS attack hits your site. 

#3 Develop & Implement the Role-Model Cybersecurity Approach 

Another required tool is to design appropriate role profiles for each job position - customer support, sales, technical team. When users of your IT infrastructure have limited access only to information that they need to effectively utilize the system, it minimizes the possibility of intentional or unintentional access to sensitive information and overall decreases business liability. 

By implementing the role-based access you would always be able to always check who and when accessed certain information which simplifies and speeds up the process of incident investigation.

#4 Comply with Privacy & Data Protection Regulations

Since any eCommerce store deals with client information in some form or another, data privacy and its protection are the essential aspects to consider when strengthening the security of your business on the Internet. Simply put, dealing with any personal information makes you a perfect target of a network security breach and can result in a data breach – the cybersecurity attack that impacts personal data and privacy, with the outcomes of tremendous financial, productivity, and reputational losses. 

For this purpose, ensure your resource complies with Worldwide Data Privacy Regulations, such as GDPR, California Privacy Regulations, and local regulators.

#5 Comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

Maintaining a PCI-compliant platform means providing safe services for your customers, and ensuring the advanced security of your business on the Internet. Being designed to protect and store the client payment data, PCI DSS compliance is a must for running any eCommerce business today. Basically, that’s a set of rules that should be followed by enterprises that process, store and transmit private banking information. 

To ensure your business complies with major compliance requirements, it’s essential to check the following aspects of your website and payment service provider: 

• Features and maintains a secure network
• Continuously improves the security of cardholders’ data
• Implements strong access and control measures
• Regularly tracks the network performance and detect the possible vulnerabilities
• Follows an information security policy
• Maintains the vulnerability management strategy

If you want to learn more about all the technical aspects of ensuring compliance with this, you can review the PCI DSS eCommerce Security Document.

#6 Outsource the PCI DSS Compliance to the Third-Party Data Processing Service

PCI DSS (payment) compliance can be a challenging process that requires lots of time and resources to get done. However, there’s a great way to get it done safely and easily by entrusting the client data processing to the highly-expertise outsourcing companies. Simply put, this means your business can collect and treat sensitive information, like cardholder data, just as it did before without needing to ever touch this data! 

The data processing service can securely care for all the business data transmission and its storage on your behalf, thus saving more time and resources to the other essential aspects of your eCommerce business.

#7 Continuously Monitor the DBMS Access 

Unauthorized access is another cybersecurity threat you should keep in mind when working on the website’s security improvements. As a rule, this happens in cases of phishing attacks, when the passwords are weak or shared, or if the specific malware is used.

However, monitoring access to client data can be a great way to detect cases of unauthorized access, as well as all the violations against the security policy. Database monitoring allows tracking the changes in DB size, controlling different employee operations, and providing seamless protection of the entire business. 

#8 Implement the WAF

Another great option to protect your site from malicious web attacks is by using a web application firewall, or WAF. This technology helps to protect websites by continuously filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between your site and the Internet and also ensures the website is both “open” and secure. 

Being updated regularly, WAFs can easily identify the latest threats and block them. Moreover, a managed WAF impacts the eCommerce performance as well: it prioritizes the security of your site or application and immediately blocks the attacks detected, thus allowing your potential customers to purchase instead of waiting for the issue to be resolved or moving to a competitor’s website.  

#9 Conduct Regular Security Audits  

Security audits are an integral part of most security management systems that allow business owners to verify the site’s security performance. According to the security compliance recommendations, such audits should be conducted on a regular basis, at least 1-2 times annually to spot and fix the weak points of a website to reduce potential losses and enhance the security of your system. 

Additionally, this process allows training your employees to detect performance issues and constantly work on improving the website’s security. Finally, it demonstrates your eCommerce business is conscious of the security of your employees, potential clients, and government regulators. 

#10 Make Use of Multi-Cloud Strategy 

As a business owner, you should know about the importance of a proper backup strategy and the danger of data lock-in issues. These two problems can be solved by choosing a multi-cloud approach instead of fully relying on a single cloud  solution. 

With the use of a multi-cloud security approach, your business can employ the latest cloud security solutions that protect critical data, assets, and applications from advanced security threats and cyberattacks across different in-cloud infrastructures and environments and enjoy data portability between different cloud platforms. 

In other words, by adopting the hybrid cloud strategy, businesses can:

• Enhance the security of their infrastructures and their critical data despite the changes over time
• Get the ability to employ the best multi-cloud providers that fully comply with their business goals and needs and provide resilience
• Design cost-effective cloud service mix
• Ensure their complete agility and workload mobility between the diverse number of cloud platforms and storage solutions, as well as provide more flexibility and scalability of their eCommerce platform

However, “cloud” can be as simple as a colocation provider - depending on the business model of the eCommerce business, According to recent research, nearly 82% of large organizations have already adopted the hybrid cloud infrastructure, and over 90% of businesses have a multi-cloud strategy in place or underway. So, in the upcoming few years, the enterprises that implemented it so far will make a strong focus on continued growth, applying the right solutions to their cloud services, and, of course, efforts to control costs and improve the security of their businesses. 

Conclusion

To sum up, eCommerce security is one of the most critical aspects to keep in mind when running a business on the Internet. To manage your website’s cybersecurity posture, conduct the security audits and try to be proactive in implementing the most effective practices to prevent cyberattacks: use WAF, conduct regular data backups, ensure your website is privacy compliant, implement multi-cloud, and many more.

All the cybersecurity tips we’ve mentioned above can enhance the security of your eCommerce site, make it more stable and efficient, significantly enhance sales, and, finally, put your business onto a new level of growth. 

Start your cybersecurity improvements today and feel the changes since day one!

The article provided by Cyberlands.io – offensive & defensive security operations company.