Ecommerce is booming, and that means great things for business owners, customers, and suppliers. But, unfortunately, it also means great things for cybercriminals who want to exploit simple vulnerabilities in ecommerce platforms for their own gain.
Here’s what you need to know.
Online Stores Have a Unique Attack Surface
Every business has its own inherent vulnerabilities to cybercriminals (unless, of course, they’re somehow still operating totally offline without any customer data, financial information, or assets stored electronically, which seems pretty unlikely).
Ecommerce businesses are no exception, thanks to their prominent, user-facing platform connected to the back-end engine via various API endpoints. Things like payment pages, third-party plugins/integrations, and customer data are all common attack vectors that leave you vulnerable to trouble.
What Does Penetration Testing Achieve?
In a word, clarity. Penetration testing is the process of utilising various techniques and tools against the business, like trying to break into your own house (or, more accurately, paying someone else to try to break into your own house). It’s a process of testing the security framework that’s already in place, finding the weak spots, and producing a detailed report that offers a clear pathway forward for fixing those vulnerabilities and making your site and system more secure against attacks.
The most important thing about penetration testing is that it deploys the exact techniques hackers and automations will be trying to use against you, not simply looking at the protocols in place and making gauging whether or not they look like ‘enough’.
Penetration tests use everything from highly sophisticated methods to the more basic, brute force attacks – say, attempting to simply kick your front door off its hinges.
For that reason, penetration test reporting is one of the most important things you could have for your business, and there aren’t any shortcuts for replicating the work of a skilled team utilising the right tools on the right platform.
What Happens When Ecommerce Security Testing is Skipped?
There are so many immediate and secondary risks to skipping security testing. Customer data, including their credit card details, can be exposed – at times, silently, if the attacker is conducting a magecart attack. They can also manipulate the prices you have on products, buying high-value items for next to nothing, and deface your site.
For that, you can be landed with a hefty fine – and that may be on top of the financial hit you’ve already taken as a result of the attack. You may also face ransomware extortion, having to pay a large sum to attackers just to regain control of your site.
Perhaps worst of all is the loss of your brand’s reputation. Customers are incredibly wary of companies that have suffered a high-profile data breach, and only a small few manage to bounce back – and even fewer get back to the level of popularity they enjoyed before the attack.
Without penetration testing, you are taking a daily gamble with your brand, its reputation, and the security of your customers. This isn’t a situation where you can rely on an annual audit to confirm whether or not you’re safe.