The world statistic says that the cases of hacking attacks on commercial websites have become more frequent, which causes huge financial losses of the victims. Mostly, the victims of the attackers are big online stores, but it does not mean that the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises are in the “safe zone”. Why online stores are hacked? What are the goals of attackers? How to minimize the possibility of an attack – check up the answers below.
Why Online Stores Are Hacked
Those who have once faced the problem of hacking knows for sure that it may solve the following possible tasks for the attackers:
- To place third-party links, advertisements, and send spam, aiming to earn some money. Such hacking often happens unnoticed by the site owner. If the owner does not regularly check it for errors, then search engines, loyal customers or a hoster may be the first to detect the attack. To prevent such a situation, people usually use woocommerce anti spam protection or alternative software.
- To receive cash rewards from the site owners.
- To steal customer data or harm a competitor’s business. This is the rarest case because not every company can afford to spend a considerable amount of money on hacking a competitor’s website.
- To satisfy their own interests. A site can be hacked just for fun. Now this does not happen as often as before. Hackers are increasingly looking for financial gain and less work “for the sake of art.”
How to Protect Your Online Store
There are no 100% secure platforms. With the proper amount of time and money, hackers can crack any site. However, the risk can be minimized by following a series of recommendations.
- If you are creating an online store based on a free CMS, minimize the installation of additional plugins if possible and do not use completely free templates. They contain the most critical vulnerabilities that hackers use to crack.
- Regularly change passwords for the site and delete inactive users with administrator rights.
- Install all updates. The search for errors and loopholes for hacking is carried out not only by hackers but also by the developers of the platform. Therefore, they regularly release bug fix updates.
- If possible, choose a closed-source CMS. The team that developed the CMS will quickly fix the situation if the hacking happens and will help restore the data.
- Use special programs to protect and monitor the status of the site. It is better to delegate their installation to professionals with experience in protecting sites from hacker attacks.
Following this simple guideline will help minimize the chance of hacking, which means better protection of your business. Take the security of your platform seriously and hacking will not cause total destruction of your business.
