The slightest suspicion that a site is not secure can cause consumers to abandon it entirely. Consumers have a lot in common with friendships: it takes years to gain a friend’s trust, but a single serious mistake can destroy it in seconds. You don’t want that as a business owner. Do you? But small or medium-sized eCommerce businesses do not have the popularity of the large ones, nor do they have inexhaustible budgets to make their sites invulnerable. That is why they must know how to secure their most valuable assets at the lowest possible cost.
Risks and how to avoid them
Ecommerce sites are exposed to the same threats as any other website: phishing, password stealing, social engineering, bots, spam, and the list goes on. But some threats put customer information and money at risk, and those are the ones that eCommerce website owners should focus on. That’s why an eCommerce WAF solution should be specially engineered to avoid putting customers’ information at risk at all costs. The threat that eCommerce website owners should be more concerned about is transaction fraud, mainly stolen credit card information and transaction interruption or redirection. Fortunately, there’s a solution, called the Payment Card Industry and Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), that’s designed to give customers a sufficient level of online payment security. Consumers have a wealth of options when shopping online and will not hesitate to leave their preferred store if it does not show security. That’s why every online merchant should meet the PCI-DSS standards to achieve credibility and protect their customers’ transactions. The PCI-DSS standards mainly ensure two concerns: the secure storage of credit card data and the secure transmission of that data across public networks. The first concern applies only to companies that store credit card data, which is not the case for most eCommerce websites that use payment gateways to receive online payments. But if an eCommerce website stores its customers’ credit card information, that information should be safely encrypted to keep cybercriminals from getting access to it. The second concern involves transmitting sensitive data, such as PINs, passwords, and security codes across public networks. The PCI-DSS standards state that sensitive information should also be encrypted when in transit to protect customers from breaches and identity theft. To learn more about the PCI-DSS standards, go to the PCI Security Standards Council page. Let’s check some of the best eCommerce firewall solutions that help small and medium-sized eCommerce websites reach PCI-DSS compliance.
Sucuri
Sucuri’s Ecommerce Website Security is a complete solution that helps maintain the customer trust, brand reputation, and revenue stream of your eCommerce website by improving its security posture. The solution takes care of the overall security status of all your software and hardware assets, services, networks, and information. A key part of the solution is Sucuri Firewall, based on Sucuri’s proprietary virtual patch and hardening technology, which qualifies Sucuri as a Level 1 PCI Compliant Service Provider. The firewall, which is the first requirement of PCI compliance, does its job by surrounding your website with a tight defense system. Sucuri’s solution also includes an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that avoids all kinds of website security incidents, especially data breaches. The system maintains the security of any credit card data that passes through its channels, keeping it in compliance with PCI-DSS standards. Your customer data will be encrypted and secured in transit, thanks to free SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt. Or if you have your own certificates, Sucuri supports them too. Sucuri works with the most popular eCommerce platforms, including Woocommerce, Magento, Shopify, Zencart, and many more.
Astra
Astra’s Ecommerce Suite is an all-in-one solution that replaces all security tools and services, from free plugins to expensive security agencies. For e-stores, Astra guarantees 100% safe checkouts, stopping all the bad traffic and making sure your website is secure from all sorts of malware. A key part of Astra Ecommerce Suite is its Intelligent Firewall, which protects your website from XSS, SQLi, spam, bad bots, and 100 more threats. It makes sure that only real users get access to your website. Astra’s automatic, machine learning-powered Malware Scanner is another of the main features of its security suite. It is available 24/7, letting you scan your site for malicious objects whenever you want. Scheduled scans can run daily, weekly, or monthly, and the results will appear in your dashboard, together with a detail of flagged files and suggested cleaning actions. With Astra, you can protect the most sensitive data of your e-commerce website with state-of-the-art security in less than 5 minutes. Forget about complicated setup processes and filling long forms with endless fields: Astra offers human help and comprehensive guidance on every step of an already simple setup process.
SiteLock
SiteLock offers an affordable solution to keep your business and your reputation safe from cyberattacks. Its main goal is to protect your most important asset: your customers. The solution is designed to detect any malicious or suspicious activity on your eCommerce website before anything bad happens by monitoring it and blocking all threats. With automated alert emails and a real-time security dashboard, SiteLock keeps you constantly updated on your eCommerce website’s security. Online shoppers feel safer if they see a trust seal on your site. For your business, that translates directly into more conversions. SiteLock’s website scanner lets you showcase the SiteLock Trust Seal on your site to instill your customers’ confidence. But it’s not just a badge; SiteLock’s eCommerce protection is also PCI-compliant, which means you can feel safe that your customers’ payment data will stay out of the reach of cybercriminals. To keep your security measures up to date, SiteLock adds to its solution the Infinity automated vulnerability patching technology, which automatically patches all your CMS vulnerabilities. It also removes malware in WordPress databases and provides 24/7 access to SiteLock’s engineers. SiteLock solutions not only protect your business but are also designed to improve your website performance and enhance your SEO strategy with malware removal. By leveraging a content delivery network (CDN), SiteLock increases your site speed by up to 50%.
Cloudflare
By leveraging its robust, cloud-based network, Cloudflare offers a suite of solutions that improve any self-hosted eCommerce website’s security and minimize its exposure to fraudulent activities. Cloudflare’s suite includes a web application firewall that blocks SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. It also encrypts all customer transactions and sensitive data with TLS 1.3, helping with the PCI-DSS certification process. It’s critical to keep your eCommerce website safe from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks during seasonal shopping events, which can easily be mistaken for expected spikes in traffic. Cloudflare for Ecommerce solutions prevents outages due to large-scale DDoS attacks and mitigates traffic spikes to prevent your infrastructure from being overloaded. It also offers load balancing to distribute traffic in case of a server outage. In addition to keeping your eCommerce safe from cybercriminals and fraudulent activities, Cloudflare’s solution also aims to increase buyer engagement by allowing you to leverage rich media and personalization without increasing page load times. It is widely accepted that high-quality images and videos help you showcase your brand and products; Cloudflare helps in that matter by caching content to minimize latency, compressing image files for faster load times, resizing images on the fly for mobile devices, and streaming product videos. When you consider a comprehensive eCommerce website security solution, you should pay attention to the hidden costs. Cloudflare offers to reduce them by improving operational efficiencies and increasing profitability. This is done by applying some of its features, such as serving static content, reducing bandwidth usage, securing website domain registration with no add-on fees, and increasing developer agility with a native API architecture.
Sqreen
Sqreen is a security solution designed to help e-commerce organizations of all sizes strengthen their application security and decrease security incidents. And if incidents do occur, it helps resolve them as quickly as possible. The Sqreen platform proposes a holistic protection scheme that combines HTTP and application-level security tokens to maximize efficiency in detecting and blocking attacks. With Sqreen, you can block the top 10 attack types in the OWASP classification. These include SQL injection, Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), and Cross-Site Scripting. Unlike traditional, static pattern-based approaches, Sqreen analyzes application execution logic in real-time to provide stronger security with almost no impact on performance figures. Security engineers can extend protection and visibility across their entire application portfolio, reducing the need for maintenance efforts. Update: Sqreen has since been acquired by Datadog. With Sqreen, deployment time is a matter of minutes. Its micro-agents spread throughout any architecture, while Smart Stack Detection automatically optimizes its configuration. You don’t have to worry about manual configurations when your application stack evolves since Sqreen protections are continually adapting to it.
Getting serious about protecting your e-commerce business
E-commerce SMBs (small to medium-size businesses) should put security at the core of their online shopping experience if they want to stay on top of a constantly changing threat scenario. By choosing a security solution specially tailored for eCommerce SMBs, store owners can focus on improving their customer’s online shopping experience without worrying about the possibility of putting their financial safety at risk and without investing a fortune in security tools and services.
