People often wonder if it is possible to defend eCommerce business from cybersecurity threats? Here are a few thoughts.
The eCommerce sector has always been one of the most common targets for cyberattacks. It is no wonder because there is no better industry for cybercriminals to access confidential personal and financial data. By breaching one small eCommerce business, criminals can get access to all the critical financial details of the company and the customers, which will result in significant damage for all involved parties. The cost of a breach is calculated in financial loss and customer trust, which can be even more damaging.
Cyber attacks can happen to any business, regardless of its size. Most businesses and organizations assume that cybercriminals will target bigger enterprises as they have a more expansive customer pool, which equals more money. But the truth is that 43% of all data breaches involve small and medium-sized businesses. While it is true that they will target big companies for their money, those bigger companies will have a cybersecurity plan in place, so they are more difficult to breach. On the other side, small and medium companies have security weaknesses, and only 14% of them consider their cybersecurity plan highly effective.
Cybercriminals won’t care about the smaller profit they can get from the breach if the process is significantly easier than when attempting to breach a big company.
This is why all eCommerce businesses, regardless of their size, need to find a way to defend eCommerce business from cybersecurity threats. Here are some information security best practices.
How to defend eCommerce Business from cybersecurity threats?
There are many different methods you can use to maximise the defense of your business against cybersecurity threats. Their effectiveness depends on how well you distribute them and how well you use them.
- Educate employees
One of the first steps you need to take to ensure your business’s security is educating your employees on how to defend eCommerce business from cybersecurity threats. If your employees are not educated on how to recognize a cyber attack, how can they stop them? Who wouldn’t open an email that looks like it is coming from your boss and access a program he asks you to download? To ensure the safety of the business and all of the employees, every business needs to implement regular cybersecurity training and create a solid policy on cyber security and, most importantly, email safety.
2. Introduce email lookup and reverse email lookup tools
Email lookup and reverse email lookup tools are the ultimate security tools to use to defend your eCommerce business. By using these tools, you can gather additional data about your
user and create a unique profile for them. They are best used together, as they function in different ways, or to be exact, they function in the opposite way. By using an email lookup tool, you can use users’ personal data to find their email addresses, and with reverse email lookup, you can access their personal data by using their email address. By having this data, you can notice fraudulent accounts before they make any significant damage. For example, you can check the email address’s age or even check if it was involved in any previous data breach, and much more as discussed here on reverse email tools.
3. Make sure all of your users implement strong and unique passwords.
The most important thing about this method is to ensure this applies to all the users, employees, and customers. Did you know that 37% of credential theft breaches used stolen or weak credentials? People are predictable when choosing their passwords, often even constantly reusing them, so it just takes one witty cybercriminal to breach your company and cause significant damage. We are all going crazy when websites are giving us a set of different rules we need to follow when creating new passwords, but that is necessary to ensure the safety of everyone included. You don’t even have to be a cybercriminal to hack a website whose Admin uses admin1234 as their password.
4. Secure your payment getaway.
Merchants use a payment gateway to accept card purchases from customers. They can verify, accept, or even decline transactions on behalf of a merchant, which is why it is vital to make sure this connection is secure. Security of payment gateway is a significant step you need to take to defend your eCommerce business and your customers’ details against cybersecurity threats.
5. Implement Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication is usually used in addition to other security methods like device fingerprinting. This method requires the user to provide at least one more method of identity verification in addition to their username and password before they can log in to a site. The most used method of multi-factor authentication is asking the user to enter a one-time code sent to their email or phone via text. This will go a long way to defend eCommerce business against cybersecurity threats.
