Money Lost due to e-commerce frauds

In 2017, E-commerce websites made a profit of over 107 billion dollars. But out of those 65 million dollars were lost in E-commerce frauds.

There are many store owners still who don’t take hackers seriously. Many others find it very vexing to implement proper security in place that doesn’t hinder the customer experience at the same time provide notch security.

In an online interface, where the interaction between the seller and buyer is almost non-existent, a security seal paints a good picture of your website. I might even be the needed push for a successful transaction to take place. Customers need assurance that they are swiping on an authentic website. Securing your store with a security solution & following compliance guidelines relevant to the business (like BBB, PCI etc.) helps to increase user trust.

So, it is very important for the owners to provide proper security against all types of e-commerce threats.

As the e-commerce website owner, it is your responsibility to be one step ahead of the attacker. We are here to provide you with all the basic knowledge of the possible e-commerce threats that e-commerce faces today. Additionally, we will also provide the safety measures that you can easily apply to guard your store better.

Potential e-commerce Threats:

Hackers don’t take a day off, so it is important that all the e-commerce merchants are well aware and are on a constant red alert for any frauds. The website owners need to constantly monitor their websites for malicious codes and malware.

Here are the 6 most common e-commerce threats to watch-out:

1. Spam:

The most common threat to e-commerce websites is spamming. These are unwanted comments or emails to your website. These comments are inserted to leave infected links on your website.

Spams are those silent bombs that explode when someone clicks on those comments and messages. These comments act like backlinks which can further add malware to your website.

2. Phishing:

The second most common e-commerce threat is obtaining your website’s information. This is done by sending you fake emails asking for access to your personal information.

These fake emails are called phishing. These emails seem authentic at first. Phishing emails have the potential to hack numerous your ecommerce website’s customers. They usually exploit the customers’ data and manipulate it further.

3. Malware:

The malicious program which is the most dangerous e-commerce threat of all time. Hackers design one specific code to hack your website and spread it to your customers’ personal devices.

These malware codes spread like wildfire. They usually focus on retrieving credit card information and interfere in all the encrypted data. There are multiple types of malware which can enter your device, so it is very important to keep your device updated with all the new anti-malware.

4. Distributed Denial Of Service:

DDoS is not something usually used by just hackers; they are sometimes used by your competitors to get your website off the internet. These competitors often hire hackers or cybercriminals to push your website off the server.

This impacts your revenue, your customers and your reputation. DDoS makes access to your customers very difficult. DDoS attacks are mostly seen whenever there is a great sale on your website.

These e-commerce threats are on a rise ever since website owners started to focus on launching their website before even checking and building a strong defense mechanism to help them from these attacks.

5. SQL Injection:

This e-commerce threat happens to numerous websites. These attacks occur when the server accepts a malicious input. Such injections result in allowing hackers to steal data and exploit the data privacy of the customers.

SQL Injections also violate your severe database. They are able to add or edit the content published on your website.

So, it is necessary to have a proactive prevention plan acting as a safeguard for your website.

6. Blocking Cart:

How many times have we gone to our favorite eCommerce sites and simply added the things we like into the shopping cart and then changed our mind and left it there? What if I tell you that by doing this you have actually opened a huge opportunity for all the potential e-commerce threats.

Hackers can block the cart by adding multiple products to your cart. They might enter your account via some product details or via a review, they might have posted on that particular product.

By adding numerous products on your cart they push the cart limit and customers see that the product is out of stock. Doing this they don’t allow customers to buy stuff from that particular website and hence they are forced to move on to another website.

This also sometimes causes severe damage and hence the targeted website loses a lot of customers.

Be Safe:

So, these were some of the most common e-commerce threats. To protect your ecommerce website, keep your software up-to-date, install a web application firewall, create regular backups, to set up all-round protection and drive tons of sales.

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Therefore it becomes important to know what to do if your site gets hacked. In fact, a set of calculated steps, if taken carefully, can even control the damage done to your site. 

We have done the dirty work for you. And came up with the following checklist. Applying this checklist can save your website from a complete debacle. 

Here they are:

1. Keep Your Calm

The most important thing for you to do is maintain your calm before proceeding to do anything. Your website is hacked but it can be recovered. Further, if you follow the correct steps in a systematic manner it would ensure minimal damage. Just follow along this guide and you will have your site up and running again in a couple of days.

2. Take Site Down

Defacement and appearance of obscene content after a hack is common. This could harm your site’s reputation as well as yours. Therefore, put your site into maintenance mode to check further damage.

In maintenance mode, your website is not available to any other person but the admin. The website is offline and the admin can perform tasks like fixing a security flaw, implement changes to design or as in our case recovering from a hack.

CMS like WordPress doesn’t offer features like Maintenance mode so you will have to install a third-party plugin.

For a more general approach you can configure your htaccess file as follows:

1. Access your website through an FTP, cPanel or SSH.
2. Find you htaccess file. It lies inside the root directory.
3. Add the following lines to it:
   
   

# redirect all visitors to alternate site but retain full access for you
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.alternate-site.com
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

Allow from 99.88.77.66 #the admin ip

2. BackUp your site

you need to take a backup of your site in its current hacked state. This could help you perform the hack’s forensic analysis on it at a later stage. Also, it is recommended to avoid the use of the browser (explained in the next point) to visit your website, we will use ssh to backup your site.

2.1 Backing Up Your Site’s Files

Follow these steps to backup your site with the help of Rsync with SSH.

1. Access your server with SSH
2. Install Rsync with `sudo apt-get install rsync`
3. run the command `sudo rsync -av delete /website-root/ backup/`
4. Run the command to create a zip file `zip -r backup.zip backup/`

The above command will create a zip backup for your site.

2.2 Backing Up Your Site’s Database

The method to backup your MySQL database is similar to the previous method with some command changes:

1. Login into the server via ssh
2. Login into the SQL database `mysql -u USERNAME -p`
3. Once into the database run this command `mysqldump –all-databases > dump.sql`

3. Avoid using the browser to view pages

Once you have taken your site down you need to be careful while you visit it for analysis purposes as you can end up spreading the malware more and make the situation worse.

Malware are often spread by exploiting vulnerabilities (Zero Day) on the web browsers. Opening an infected page on your web browser may infect your system as well and end up contaminating your local network too.

Analyze the files using the terminal. A text editor can also come handy in confirming there is no malicious code present on your site source files. Then you can use your web browser to visit your site.

4. Change Password

If you are still able to login with your credentials it means that the hacker has not changed or has no access to them. Therefore, now is the best time to change credentials for every user account on your site. This includes the password to your admin panel, MySQL database, hosting account, Linux servers, root password, etc.

To change the password to your Linux server, SSH into the Linux server and run the following command:

“passwd”

This will ask for the current password, the new password and thus will change your password.

To change the password to WordPress, Joomla dashboards follow these guides:

• Resetting Password in WordPress
• Resetting Password in Joomla

If you are running PHP custom site, change the password in MySQL query according to your database and you are good to go.

It is also recommended to use password managers such as LastPass, KeePass or BitWarden if you are using CMSs based websites. These tools generate long and secure passwords randomly.

5. Diagnose For Vulnerabilities

Now that you have secured your site, it’s time to find out what was exploited in the first place that led to the attack. Hacker commonly exploits the following vulnerabilities in a site:

• User Configurations
• Zero-Day Bugs
• Improperly Sanetanzing the User Input
• Vulnerable Third-Party Plugins

You should by comparing the backup created after the site was hacked to last good backup and see if there is any injected code in the code-base. You should also check the log files for maliciously crafted SQL requests or any other suspicious activities.

Vulnerabilities in the third-party plugins are most often exploited to gain unauthorized access to your website in CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, and OpenCart. You can refer to these hack removal guides for top CMS:

• 10 Step WordPress Hack Removal Guide
• Ultimate Joomla Hack Removal

These guides will be of great help in cleaning the hack manually.

Else, you can always opt for a professional malware cleanup. For this, you can go for Priority Malware Cleanup by security experts at Astra Security. They enjoy a reputation of record turnaround time (usually between 6-8 hours) in the industry.

Additionally, a dedicated security solution such as Astra can also help you keep a check on the oncoming traffic, and other cyber attacks (including XSS, CSRF, LFI, RFI, Spam injection, OWASP Top 10 and more)

Conclusion

Getting your site hacked can cause a dent in your and your website’s reputation. Therefore it is important to respond with a systematic approach towards the hack removal process to minimize the damage caused by hackers.

Further, being proactive is any day better than being reactive. Invest in a trusted security solution like Astra avoid getting hacked in the first place.

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Hide your login error messages

Error login messages could provide hackers with ideas about whether they have figured out your username and password correctly or incorrectly. It is a good idea to hide it from all unauthorized logins. Just add the following code in functions.php

add_filter('login_errors',create_function('$a', "return null;"));

Maintaining backups

Keep backups of your entire WordPress blog. This is just as vital as it is to keep your site secure from hackers. If the hackers are successful at least you will have a full backup files to get your site up and running again quickly.

Changing default “wp_” Prefixes

Your WordPress blog might be at risk if you are using the predictable wp_ prefixes in your database. Use the WP Security Scan plugin.

Prevent directory browsing

Another security issue is when your directories and all the files in the directory are accessible to public. Use this test to check if your WordPress directories are properly protected:

Enter the following URL in browser, without the quotes. “http://www.domain.com/wp-includes/”

If it shows blank or redirect you back to home page, you are safe. However, if you see screen similar to the image below, you are not.

To prevent access to all your directories, place this code inside your .htaccess file.

# Prevent folder browsing
Options All –Indexes

Keep WordPress core files & Plugins up to date

One the easiest ways to keep your WordPress site safe is to imply make sure your files are always current. Here are few ways you can do that:

• Deactivate & remove plugins not used – Unused plugin will eventually become outdated and can cause a security risk so it is best to delete them.
• Login to your dashboard frequently –When an update is available you will see a A yellow notification at the top of your dashboard. Login frequently and keep up to date with the most recent WordPress files. Subscribe to WordPress Releases RSS.

That’s just a few essential tips to keep your WordPress blog secure. There are plenty of others. Remember the more you do the less you are at risk.

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WP Database Backup

WP Database Backup is an easy to use plugin that allows you to backup your core WordPress database tables with just a few mouse clicks. Don’t let its ease of use fool you – this is a powerful tool and it remains one of the most popular plugins to secure WordPress powered websites.

Plugin Security Scanner

This plugin determines whether any of your plugins or themes have security vulnerabilities. It does this by looking up details in the WPScan Vulnerability Database.

It will run a scan once a day, and e-mail the administrator if any vulnerable plugins or themes are found.

WP-DB Manager

This is yet another terrific plugin that lets you manage your WP database. It can be used as an option rather than using the WordPress Backup Manager.

Ask Apache Password Protect

This plugin does not control WordPress, nor will it mess with your database. Rather it uses speedy, proven built-in security features that provide a number of multiple security layers to your blog.

Really Simple SSL

Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https.

To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.

Limit Login Attempts

Limit Login Attempts blocks the internet address from making any further attempts after a specified number of retries has been reached, which makes a brute-force attack next to impossible.

WP-OTP

With WP-OTP you can easily set up 2 Factor Authentication with One Time Passwords for your WordPress login.
This extra layer makes your WordPress site a lot more secure.

Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior is a plugin that aids in fighting annoying spammers. The plugin will help you prevent spam messages on your blog, and it will also attempt to limit access to your WordPress blog, so they will not even be able even to read it.

User Spam Remover

This plugin has a name that gives away just what its function is. This is a popular plugin that helps in the prevention and removal of unwanted spam messages.

There you have it – a handful of essential plugins you should install on your WordPress blog.

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So how does the password service keeps all these preposterous passwords secure? Easy! You have a master password for the service. This must be something that you are going to be able to remember. It will keep all of the other passwords safe and secure. Even if it’s stolen by hackers, to access all of your passwords they would need your master password.

It may seem like a complicated security approach, but it does work. It certainly is a solid method to keep your WordPress site safe, along with the rest of your digital life.

Here are some tips to get the most from your password service:

1. Have a Good Master Password

The strength of your master password is key. This must be a strong password. It should follow all the criteria that makes a strong password and you will likely need to spend time memorizing it, but it should be one of the few passwords you’ll ever have to remember again.

2. Passwords, That You Will Need to Type

Your master password is not the only password you will have to memorize. A password service doesn’t work on some passwords. This means even with your password service there are handful of passwords that you will still have to remember. Make sure that they are good ones! Thankfully, by using a password service the number of passwords you will have to remember in total should be way below a dozen.

3. Remember, it Takes Time

When you transition from taking care of your own passwords to having a password service generate and track your passwords, you need to remember that it’s going to take time. So be patient!

4. Consider Two-Factor Authorization

If you really want to increase your WordPress password security you can use what is called the two factor authorization where there are two levels of authenticity, making it that much more difficult for hackers to gain access to your WordPress site.

A password service is a great way to get the strongest passwords possible and that’s good protection!

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There are a number of ways to protect your database-driven ASP or PHP site from being attacked by the hackers, that range from weak to strong security. Learn the most efficient ways to slow down the hackers who use methods like SQL injection attacks and/or XSS by means of the URL query string and form inputs.

Two common types of hacker blocking techniques are input validation and custom error pages. These methods are so simple you won’t have any problem doing them even with just basic coding knowledge. Your greatest strategy would be to put up one or more obstacle.

1. SQL database driven websites are at risk.
2. Setup custom error pages.
3. Keep the details of your database from getting into the hacker’s hands with the setup of a custom error page for your website. Hackers will not see any detailed error messages. If you do nothing else, this is the one thing that every site needs. Otherwise, you are basically providing the hackers with an open invitation into your site’s database and offering the hackers all the information they require to launch an attack.
4. In addition to hunting for errors, hackers can enter more dangerous code than a simple single quote in the URL query string. In an attempt to carry out malicious scripts on the database, a variety of creative coding is engaged, such as %20HAVING%201=1; shutdown with no wait– or even a lot worse. Once the hacker can carry out these scripts, the defenseless database is like theirs for the taking. The hacker never needs to have the database login, nor does the hacker need the connection string because he/she is utilizing the URL query string, where there is already has an open connection.
5. To check if the input entered into your URL query string or your text box is actually safe, you can use input validation rules. Using ASP code on your web page(s) can authenticate the input collected from the query string to make sure it includes only characters that are safe. Once it is deemed to be safe, it can then be stored in a new variable, then inserted into the SQL string and sent to your database.

These are a few technical ways to prevent hacking of your website. Put them to good use.

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Malicious hackers have taken down big corporations like PayPal, banks, the US Government, and the list goes on. If they can be hacked, you are probably thinking you don’t have a chance at stopping them. You’d be wrong. With a few things that you can do yourself to help protect your site.

Of course, by no means are these tips fool proof, but they will certainly help to increase your site’s security and every little bit of help can go a long way towards decreasing your risk. After all, there will be easier targets out there.

If you protect your site and other WordPress users do not, then you are still at risk. If they protect their site and you choose not to then they will still be at risk. This needs to be an undertaking by all users of the WordPress site.

All websites are at risk, but some are at a higher risk than others. If you believe your site is at higher risk, then you need to put stronger measures into place. You might want to hire the pros.

For most of us, there isn’t a need for extreme measures. Just the implementation of a couple of simple security steps could save you plenty of hassle. These include a different user name than the default ‘admin,’ strong passwords, protected files, current backups, installed updates, limited login attempts, and more. Take the time to do the tasks that will protect your website from hackers or at least reduce the likelihood that you will be targeted and your website hacked.

But why are hackers so intent on hacking your WordPress website? There are numerous reasons, but these are some of the most common:

• To hijack your website’s traffic
• To access paid items
• To create links back to their website
• To collect your users email addresses
• To create links to another site (paid for links)
• To place content on your site

Being aware of these dangerous hackers is the start to making your website safe and less of a target.

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