Cyber criminals are getting smarter. And with more automation in the industry, cybercrime has increased year after year, with small businesses particularly vulnerable. Doing everything you can to protect your site and your users has become fundamental, whether they interact with your traditional or mobile site. Here are some tips to preserve the safety and security of your site, and reassure your customers that you’ve taken every necessary step to protect the integrity of every transaction. If they don’t believe it, they won’t transact.
1. Start with a secure and highly sophisticated object-orientated eCommerce platform. Separate administrative functions from public-facing computer servers and stay abreast of security updates and install them. Out-of-date software is a major reason sites are breached. Once a patch is available, update your site with it immediately.
2. Secure your infrastructure inside and out with tiers of security including firewalls, internal password protection, employee background checks, intrusion detection and protection against denial of service attacks — designed to bog down your site with a flood of bogus transactions. If users see your site is down, they lose confidence and you’re at risk of losing more than one sale. Being aware of your site’s vulnerabilities and development cycles will allow you to understand where any bottlenecks may naturally occur, and how any malicious user could most likely target your site, with queries that could overload a computer processor or the upload of oversized data files. Invest in third-party firms who will test your site and expose the weaknesses in your website infrastructure. And build audit trails to highlight your site's strong foundation of internal controls.