E-commerce Insights: How to Secure Your Web Site Against Hackers

From this article, you’ll learn how to start protecting your Web site and customer data from potential security breaches.

A security breach could hit your company without warning. A hacker could bring your firm to its knees with terrifying swiftness. If your Web site is insecure today, hackers could break into it tonight, and tomorrow you could face widespread customer wrath, disastrous publicity and significant legal liability.

If your firm hasn’t yet taken steps to reduce your Web security risk, now is the time to do so. Following are suggestions to get you started.

Yes, You Are a Target

Too many catalog CEOs believe their sites escape notice from bad guys due to the size of their companies, the type of goods they sell or their positive corporate reputations. But that’s not true, security experts say.

“Every online merchant needs to be thinking about security,” says Ken Godskind, vice president of marketing at Coconut Creek, Fla.-based AlertSite, a remote-hosted Web monitoring firm serving more than 1,500 merchants. “The Web is now digital Main Street. User expectations are very high; [site] availability is not a luxury, and security is now a basic requirement.”

Sundeep Kapur of NCR Corp.’s Dayton, Ohio-based e-Commerce Solutions Group, which provides e-commerce platforms for catalogers, agrees. “The biggest issue in security is getting management to realize that protecting the customer is key to protecting your brand. You need to acknowledge this risk, handle it and make your customers know you are a reliable place to do business,” he says.

Acknowledging you face online risk is the first step to mitigating it. Questions to ask yourself:
• Who in the organization is responsible for Web site security?
• What processes do we have in place to reduce the risk of attack?
• If attacked, do we have a response plan ready?