Online credit card transactions are significant to any eCommerce business. Customers rely on your website for the security of their credit card information. In case even if one credit card number is stolen from your website, your business reputation can be easily tarnished and this will have a negative impact on the sales.
Therefore it is crucial to be aware of the potential security flaws and the measures to mitigate them to protect yourself. Any breach in the cardholder data can cost big money in fines and remediation efforts. The most important aspect of any eCommerce website is the eCommerce hosting that you invest in.
The smooth functioning of the eCommerce business depends on the resources and features provided with eCommerce hosting. This post highlights the points that might be instrumental in leaking out the credit card information and the measures to safeguard against them.
Insecure Transactions
In absence of the secure sockets layer protocol (SSL), the traffic between your website and your customer’s computer is transmitted in clear-text, and this is easily readable. Crucial information like credit card numbers, card verification codes, expiration dates, addresses and names can be easily acquired by a thief.
This information is easily accessible at places where there is free wireless access, such as airports, coffee shops or malls. Therefore it is highly important that the eCommerce hosting UK plan that you select incorporates an SSL certificate to safeguard your online transactions. If you have sub donmains linked to your main domain, you can also opt for a WildCard SSL certificate that will secure your sub domains as well.
Improper Storage
Most of the eCommerce websites store the credit card numbers and customer data even after it is required. Even with a secure eCommerce website, there is a possibility of the credit card numbers getting stolen by the employees, contractors, the clerical staff or any other person who has access to your servers.
Therefore preferably you must hold the customer data only as long as the transactions are being processed or maybe as long as any return/exchange is completed. Once that is done, the information should be automatically purged from your database. In case you would like to create a database of the customer’s information, make sure it’s properly encrypted and secured. Only those people with a need to see this data should have access to it.
Software Vulnerabilities
Similar to the other types of software applications, most of the eCommerce software applications are subject to programmer errors. These errors might enable a thief to access the credit card numbers by entering bad information into the forms.
In order to avoid this it is essential to stay current with security updates, you can surely have a word with your website hosting company regarding this aspect. You will also come across free tools for detecting the software vulnerabilities. Again the key is to invest in the most appropriate eCommerce hosting UK plan with the right web host.
SQL Injection Attacks
If you try to make amendments in the URL’s that are used on various pages of your eCommerce website, a malicious user might try to pull out the credit card information or any other personal information out of the backend database of the website. In order to safeguard against this type of attack, you will have to work closely with your website hosting company for obtaining security updates.
For the customized applications, free tools like SQLMap can help in terms of detecting if your database application is vulnerable. Usually, all the SQL statements in code must be “escaped out” or written in such a way to ignore unexpected input. You can also hide the variables used to access the database and use mod-rewrite for your URLs to avoid the SQL injection attacks.
Spamming/Phishing
A phishing email might look like a real email from your company, this mail might instruct people to click on a link in order to update their personal information. This link actually gets redirected to a fake version where a malicious user collects the credit card numbers and other information. Most of these emails look so real and genuine that even the experienced internet users might not know about their authenticity.
This is a difficult problem to solve entirely, all you can do is make your customers know that you will never solicit their information via email. As additional security measures, you can use the Extended Validation Organization Authentication SSL certificates that will enable the customers to confirm that the website they are visiting is actually yours by showing an extra validation in the address bar of their browser.
Server Security
The servers that are not monitored and updated regularly are vulnerable to security breaches. Thieves run automated worldwide scans in order to detect the servers that can be breached. For this, it is essential to ensure that your website hosting company has proper administrative policies and service level agreements to ensure the security of the hosting server.
It is essential to do some research over the website hosting companies to find out the best one that provides with the most powerful servers along with round the clock server monitoring.
Backups
Backups are essential for restoring websites from crashes, it is important to ensure that any data that is stored in your live website is also stored on your backups. Sometimes backups also reside on the same server as your live site. In case a thief gets access to your server, he might steal the credit card numbers from your backup instead of your live site. You can protect the backups of your customer data through encryption and storage on a separate secured system.
The points and measures mentioned above will enable you to safeguard against the beach of your customer credit card information. This is the most crucial aspect pertaining to an eCommerce website. You can earn a good reputation with safe online transactions.
Along with investing in the most appropriate eCommerce hosting UK plan, it is also essential to consider the measures mentioned above to establish the most efficient and secure eCommerce website that provides the customers with the most convenient online shopping experience.
For secure, high-performance and reliable Cloud Hosting or eCommerce hosting, visit our website.
