How the Shift to Ecommerce Affects Retail Cybersecurity

Ecommerce stores gained a large share of the retail market last year while consumers were stuck at home last year. In 2020, online sales accounted for 21.3 percent of total retail sales, up from 15.8 percent in 2019. As businesses transition to e-commerce, cybersecurity becomes increasingly worrisome. This is how you can protect your company.

How does e-commerce affect retail cybersecurity?

Increases website traffic

When shop-based businesses first switch to selling online, they may not realize the need to consider the surge in website traffic. Too many people visiting the site can overload the servers and cause everything to shut down. When you make the move to ecommerce, it’s time to increase your server allocations.

But legitimate traffic isn’t the only threat. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks occur when malicious actors flood a website with bot traffic to overload the servers. These attacks are often used as a type of blackmail or extortion attempt. Attackers will ask for money to stop the DDoS attack.

Also read: 5 Best Practices for Defending against DDoS Attacks

Stores more customer data on corporate servers

When selling online, businesses need to store more customer information on their servers, including credit card information and customer names, addresses, and phone numbers. All of this data is a valuable target for hackers, and companies must take the necessary precautions to protect their customers. Secureworks provides a directory of known attackers and their threat actors to help organizations identify the types of problems they should protect themselves from.

Rafe Pilling, Senior Information Security Researcher at Secureworks, said, “Theft and fraud of payment card information (PCI) and theft of personally identifiable customer information (PII) are two of the most important issues that retailers of all kinds are concerned about. A successful ransomware attack can not only paralyze business, but also lead to the theft of regulated and commercially sensitive data. “

“Minimizing the stored data is the most effective strategy. Criminals can’t steal what you don’t have. “

Rafe Pilling, Senior Information Security Researcher at Secureworks

He goes on to explain how companies can protect their customers from theft. “Minimizing the stored data is the most effective strategy. Criminals can’t steal what you don’t have. ”They must follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and are only allowed to store the necessary information on their servers. “Visibility in the entire company network is also crucial,” says Pilling. An XDR (Extended Detection and Response) platform gives you the visibility your IT team needs to detect and block incoming threats.

Mandates additional website plugins

To increase the functionality of their ecommerce site, businesses either need to custom code their website or add third-party plugins. Plugins are generally a cheaper option and easier to implement, but they come with their own risks. Not all website platforms carefully monitor the plugins they have on their app store, so you need to be careful which ones you add to your website. Read the reviews and carefully check the documentation before installing anything.

Courtney Radke, CISO for National Retail at Fortinet, explains some common problems with third-party plugins and how to protect yourself from them. “As retailers continue to add cloud-based applications for both their employees and their customers, they need to improve their security capabilities beyond what they get from cloud service providers. Such applications are susceptible to various threats and the organizations that run these applications often have to meet compliance requirements. ”Radke recommends that companies use a web application firewall (WAF), secure web services and APIs to protect against known and unknown threats use.

Requires additional training for employees

Theft detection in person and theft detection online require very different skills and training protocols. When you move to ecommerce, you need to train your staff to identify and avoid phishing attempts while hiring cybersecurity experts to monitor your website and block and eliminate threats. Smaller businesses may want to hire a managed services provider to do this rather than employing an in-house team.

Joe Byrne, Regional CTO at AppDynamics, part of Cisco, while discussing the paradigm shift businesses must make in moving to e-commerce, noted that companies that implement a strategy based on full- Stack observability based. “Full-stack observability enables monitoring and can also provide the business context of the entire IT stack, from the consumer-oriented level to the network and the infrastructure of an application.”

Byrne explains that this method “enables IT teams to discover anomalies, problems and security threats in real time and put everything into business context, which means that previous remedies can be resolved hours and days in minutes. “Speeding up response times can limit the amount of data that an attacker can access if they break into your network.

Also Read: Email Security Tips To Prevent Phishing And Malware

Protect your ecommerce store from changing cyber threats

Cyber ​​criminals are getting smarter, but the experts are also working to stop them. To protect your online business from falling victim to attackers, you need to take the right steps to secure your website. Choose reputable hosting companies, carefully examine all third-party plugins, and incorporate cybersecurity tools designed to weed out malicious traffic and prevent phishing attempts. With these precautionary measures, you can keep your online customers safe and satisfied.

Read On: The Best Cyber ​​Security Tools For Small Businesses

source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/how-the-shift-to-ecommerce-affects-retail-cybersecurity/