Three Ways to Protect Your Ecommerce Site against Being Hacked

In our modern world, you cannot run a successful business without having a strong web presence. The likelihood is that a large amount of your transactions are carried out online, and this means that without taking the proper measures, you will inevitably be vulnerable to hacking.

Hackers can infiltrate your system to extract highly sensitive information. Credit card details are amongst the most frequently stolen data, and should these be taken from your website, it would reflect very badly on your company.

You thus have a duty to take care of your customers and their online safety, and you don’t have to be an I.T expert to successfully accomplish such a task. Here are just three of the ways that you can protect your site from being hacked…  

#1: Don’t Store Sensitive Data

It’s the simplest rule in the book; if you don’t want sensitive data to be stolen, don’t store it to begin with. There is no real reason to keep records on all of your customers, especially if these relate to their credit card numbers, expiration dates, or card verification codes. Although having these details automatically fill themselves in may save buyers a small amount of time, prioritise their safety and purge all old records from your database, keeping only those which are essential for charge-backs and refunds. If you have nothing to steal, hackers will have nothing to take.

#2: Set Up System Alerts for Suspicious Activity

It’s also a good idea to set up alert notices that will inform you of any suspicious transactions. Repeated or very large transactions from the same IP address, for example, could indicate fraudulent activity, and to ensure that you’re not a party to it, make sure that you get a heads up and can look at the situation in more detail before approving orders. Try to set up additional alerts for multiple orders placed by the same person using different credit cards, phone numbers that are significantly different from the billing address, and orders where the card holder and recipient names do not match. These could all be red flags alerting you to criminal activity. 

#3: Get in Touch with the Experts

Thirdly and finally, don’t seek to shoulder the burden of protecting your website all by yourself; seek assistance from the experts too. Companies like Nettitude can perform a process known as penetration testing on your behalf, which will flag up any vulnerabilities that might make you susceptible to cybercrime. Using both technical and non-technical assessments, they’ll be able to help you better understand your risks and how to remedy them.  

Follow these three simple steps today to protect your business from being hacked.