Essential for compliance, company reputation and consumer trust, protecting customers’ payment data is crucial for all online businesses. Security is critical given that credit card information is a key target for cybercriminals and that data breaches can result in significant penalties and lost sales. In this post, we look at seven ways online businesses can protect customers from credit card data theft.
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1. Use SSL/TLS encryption
Data travelling between a user’s browser and a website can be intercepted en route, enabling cybercriminals to access payment information during a purchase. To protect against this, website owners should use SSL/TLS encryption.
SSL certificates encrypt data during transit, making it unreadable even if stolen, thus ensuring it remains private. Hosting providers often offer free (Let’s Encrypt) or premium (GlobalSign) SSL certificates and the even more secure TLS (transport layer security) encryption.
Without an SSL certificate, browsers may flag a website as non-secure, which can deter potential customers and attract cybercriminal attacks.
2. Ensure PCI DSS compliance
If you handle transactions directly on your website, your payment gateway provider will require you to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This security standard requires any business that handles, stores or transmits cardholder data to:
- Store cardholder data securely.
- Implement strong access controls.
- Conduct regular security updates and vulnerability scans.
- Use a PCI-compliant hosting provider that offers firewalls, intrusion detection and encryption methods.
While the first three of these measures can be addressed quite easily, choosing the right service provider is more challenging. If you have already set up your hosting with a non-PCI DSS-compliant web host, you may need to change your provider to become compliant yourself. If you are just setting up an online business and intend to handle transactions, then you should check the PCI DSS status of the provider before making a choice.
Looking for eCommerce hosting? Read: Crucial Web Hosting Requirements for eCommerce Businesses
3. Tokenise card details
Similar to encryption, tokenisation replaces sensitive payment information, like card numbers, with randomly generated tokens, which are meaningless if intercepted. The advantage over encryption is that tokenised data cannot be reversed without access to a secure token vault, whereas encrypted data can be reversed if cybercriminals manage to steal the encryption keys. As a result, with tokenisation, card details remain secure even if your database is compromised.
Tokenisation is available from many payment gateways, enabling you to handle transactions securely without storing sensitive customer information. This is not only safer for your customers but helps you comply with PCI DSS.
4. Use a secure payment gateway
Payment gateways are essential third-party services that act as an intermediary between your customers’ bank and your bank to facilitate smooth and secure payments. They include companies like Stripe, PayPal, WorldPay and Square. When choosing a gateway provider, businesses should opt for one which is known and trusted by their customers, and which offers features such as encryption or tokenisation, fraud detection, real-time transaction monitoring and chargeback prevention.
Some providers allow transactions to be completed on your website, while others redirect users to their own gateway’ to process the payment. Opting for the latter means your website will not handle the transaction or the payment data itself, making it easier for you to comply with standards and regulations.
Need help setting up online payments? Read: How to Accept PayPal and Card Payments on Your Website
5. Enforce strong authentication measures
Hackers can get access to payment data stored on your systems through brute force attacks and stealing login credentials from staff falling victim to phishing and other techniques. For this reason, you will need to implement robust authentication measures, including:
- Enforcing strong passwords: This ensures both customers and employees use complex passwords containing numbers, upper and lowercase letters and symbols.
- Two-factor authentication (2FA): This requires users and employees to input additional, time-sensitive login data, besides username and passwords, e.g., a code generated on their phone or sent to them as an SMS or email.
- IP whitelisting: This ensures that only trusted IP addresses can access your payment platforms.
Many of these security measures are available from web hosts and can be used to secure your hosting account, control panel, website admin area and payment systems. Moreover, some hosts also enable you to password-protect individual directories and folders.
It is also important to limit access based on user roles to ensure that only the people who need payment data as part of their jobs are given access to it. This way, if login credentials are stolen, the potential for damage is limited.
For more information about 2FA, read: Two-Factor Authentication: Why You Need It for Your Web Hosting
6. Fraud prevention policies
While payment gateways will use AI-powered fraud detection tools to analyse transactions in real-time and flag suspicious payments before they are processed, businesses can implement fraud prevention and other security policies of their own.
Firstly, they can make use of the intrusion detection systems (IDS) and real-time security monitoring provided by their web hosts. This will prevent malicious traffic and activities that could lead to a data breach.
Additionally, they can use firewalls to block known fraudulent or suspicious IP addresses and utilise geolocation verification to ensure that transactions originate from where you expect them to.
7. Keep software up to date
Cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software to gain access to your system and thus to customer payment data. To prevent this:
- Regularly update your CMS platform (e.g., WordPress), plugins and payment processing software.
- Enable automatic updates and security patching where possible.
- Choose a secure web host that provides server updates, firewalls and malware detection as part of their hosting plans.
Conclusion
Keeping customer credit card data safe is vital for online businesses. The most effective way to achieve this is through SSL/TLS encryption, PCI DSS compliance, tokenisation and strong authentication, together with fraud detection, regular software updates and a secure payment gateway. By opting for a security-focused web host, businesses can also benefit from the multi-layered protection this provides, including firewalls, intrusion and malware detection and phishing filters.
Looking for hosting that protects your online store and customer data? Webhosting UK is a PCI DSS-compliant web host that provides robust, 24/7 security. Using firewalls, intrusion and malware detection, DDoS prevention, spam, malware and phishing filtering, SSL/TSL and encryption, we defend your website and customer data against sophisticated cyberattacks and data breaches. For more information about our hosting solutions, visit our homepage.
