As the holiday shopping season begins, busy customers will place millions of orders with online retailers, both large and small. The good news is that it’s easier than ever for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to build their own ecommerce websites. The bad news? A single security incident can have catastrophic consequences from which SMBs can’t recover. But there are plenty of basic steps that ecommerce companies can take to reduce the risk of being hacked, defrauded, or imitated online. Our own Information Security Threat Analyst, Marc Laliberte, recently spoke with a reporter for CIO.com and Network World about how small businesses can protect their ecommerce websites. Here’s an excerpt from the article with one of Marc’s suggestions:
Keep your site updated: “Unpatched applications and extensions will make your ecommerce site an easy target,” says Laliberte. “Hackers love low-hanging fruit and often use automated web crawlers to look for sites with unpatched applications. Keeping your website and backend software updated with the latest security patches is the single biggest (and often simplest) step a small business can take towards stopping an attack.”
Read the full article with more advice from Marc and other fraud, trademark and security experts at Network World and CIO.com.