As an eCommerce business owner, you may be laudably focused on improving your eCommerce website. You’re busy creating a responsive design, a clear logo, offering exciting deals, making navigation easy, improving ways people can contact you, and providing easy payment options. However, this may not be enough to guarantee your success. You also have to implement network security to protect your business from data breaches. If you fail to do this, you risk all your hard work in optimizing the various elements of your business going up in smoke.
Some recent examples of data breaches will give you some idea of how crucial it is to complete this piece in assembling your business model.
Record Retail Data Breaches
Only recently, from April all the way to September 2014, hackers attacked Home Depot . Eventually, the hackers won, and one of the biggest home-improvement retailers in the world announced that 56 million credit card numbers had been stolen.
This huge number shattered the previous record held by Target who had reported an astonishing theft of 40 million credit card numbers the security breach at Target . This retail nightmare resulted in the Chief Information Officer Beth Jacob and the Chief Executive Officer Gregg Steinhafel being asked to resign. In addition, the data loss was estimated to have cost the company $200 million, As a consequence of this heavy loss, 475 sales people were laid off for no fault of their own.
What Can Be Done?
Hackers are targeting eCommerce sites for a good reason: these sites store thousands of credit card details. Hackers, scammers and fraudsters consider big and small eCommerce platforms much more profitable than a risky bank robbery.
Fortunately, eCommerce websites are not helpless, and, in fact, there is a lot that can be done to tighten up the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities.
Here are at least five effective ways:
- Get Advanced Network Security.In the same way that burglars can break into a house because a back window has been left open, hackers can break into an eCommerce site because there is a hole in the security. Since there are many potential holes that hackers can exploit, it is advisable to use a comprehensive network security system that protects against advanced target attacks and persistent threats. This security application should be able to have a high detection rate, provide in-depth analysis, and offer a rapid response in real time to a hacker attack.
- Guarantee cardholder’s protection. Be sure to comply with the credit and debits card set of standards called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This protects a cardholder’s information because it applies a number of security controls. Abide by these established standards even if your business relies on a payment gateway. An additional layer of protection to safeguard the pathway between a customer’s computer and a merchant’s server is to use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication.
- Delete Compromising Customer Data. While you will want to keep customer data necessary for cold calls or for email marketing campaigns like names, phone numbers and email addresses, you should only keep a small amount of credit or debit card information to process refunds or handle charge-backs. PCI standards forbid keeping old customer records that contain credit card numbers.
- Use Multiple Layers of Protection. A single layer of security may be insufficient to breach an attack. If hackers breach the firewall, they will then have to deal with additional layers of security like search queries, login password protection, and contact forms. Multiple levels of protection, one behind the other, can protect against even severe app-level attacks like SQL injections.
- Protect against Distributed Denial of Service attacks. One of the most frequently used weapons deployed by hackers is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). What’s more, this weapon is often engineered to mutate into even more sophisticated versions. One solution is to use the cloud. Cloud services offer scrubbing nodes that only permit real traffic to filter through to an eCommerce site.
Summary
While focusing on developing your platform, you can take practical measures to avoid the fate of victims like Target and Home Depot who lost millions because of holes in their network security. Take steps today to get advanced network security applications, to guarantee cardholder’s protection, to delete compromising customer data, to use multiple layers of protection, and to protect against distributed denial of service attacks. You may consider completing a certified data protection officer training course that enables you to develop the necessary knowledge, skills and competence to effectively implement and manage a compliance framework with regard to the protection of personal data.
