Is Your Magento Store Secure? Here’s the Solution of Your Concern

Magento, despite being one of the robust e-commerce platforms available for online business players, has often found itself at the recieving end of hacking attacks and unauthorized logins, which further lead to online frogeries. Due to its huge popularity and the fact that it involves a lot of monetary transactions, e-businesses are realising the vulnerability of the platform and are vying to safegaurd their store from security breaches and malware attacks.

So, how would you plan to protect your Magento store against the threat of cyber criminals? Well, the process is not as tricky as you might be thinking of. You only need to follow some simple security tips and make sure that you have incorporated all these basic things to your Magento store.

But before we proceed to the tips, let’s discuss the common techniques employed by hackers to break in to your Magento site.

1. DDOS (Distributed Denial of Services) Attacks

It’s a kind of hacking technique which destroys your server’s capacity and thus makes your website unavailable for your users. After this, the hacker proceeds to attack on the various functions of your website.
2. Broken Authentication and Session Management Attacks

This hacking technique performs malicious activities over your authentication functions and then spoils sessions IDs and cookies to gain an unwanted access to your account.
3. Cross-site Scripting

With this technique hackers can bypass the authentication algorithms that webmasters implement on their websites to block unauthorized access and thus, cross-site scripting helps them to penetrate the security features and exploit the sensitive data on the website.

Now, you have get an idea of the common security threats executed by the hackers. It’s time to know what steps you can undertake to make your website secure.

1. Always Use the Latest Magento’s Version

No matter how bulky you feel while switching from one version to the other, it’s always recommended to plunge into the latest version of the Magento store. Updating is important to maintain your website and keep it secure from the security threats.
2. Opt for a Strong Password

Be wise while choosing the password for your store and make sure you select the one which is not easy to interpret. Remember, your password is a key to your sensitive and highly confidential information related to your transactions and customer data. So, it’s crucial to make your password which is at least 10 characters long and contains numerical, alphabetical and special characters, so that unwanted people don’t crash it.
3. Use Two-factor Authentication

Simply having a password isn’t enough unless until you don’t use a protective two or multiple layers of authentication to mitigate the risk of security attacks. There are some extensions available that help you to employ two-level authentication such as Rublon, so that you don’t have to feel jittery about the password related threats.
4. Set a Reliable Custom Path for Your Store

Online owners generally access their Magento admin panel on Magentosite.com/admin, which makes it extremely easy for the hackers to break it to the website and crash it. But you can prevent the situation by using a custom path to your admin panel. The process makes it difficult for the hackers to guess your password and thus prepare it against the security hacks.
5. Use Secure FTP

Interpreting the FTP passwords is the most sough after and easiest ways for hackers to gain an unauthorized access to your account. However, you can escape the situation by using SFTP (SSH File Protocols). The protocol calls for a private file submission and uses a special key to authenticate the user.
6. Disable Directory Indexing

Disabling Directory Indexing is a great way to strengthen the security level of your website. By doing so, you’ll have the ability to put out of sight all the files, which are stored in your domain.
7. Regular Magento Backups

Having a robust preventive measures against security hacks is great, but it’s like a cherry om the cake if you have an active backup plan for your Magento store. When your website is being hacked or exploited by the hackers, it’s the backup plan that comes to your rescue and ensure continuity of your website.

Conclusion

Security is one of the major concerns of every online business owner and if they fall into the trap of hackers, sleepless nights are in order. So, if you want to guard your online venture, follow the above mentioned security tips and protect your store from possible malicious activities.

Author Signature: Danial Wright is an enthusiastic blogger cum magento developer. Currently he is working for Magentax – Magento Outsourcing Service provider. He loves to write blogs and tutorials for Magento beginners and professionals.