Prepare Your Online Store for the Holidays

This article is originally posted by our partner, Reflectiz. Click here to view their original article.

The holiday season is just around the corner now that the summer is signaling its departure. Unless you’ve lived on the moon in the past decade, you’re aware that the holidays have been the busiest shopping period in the U.S. for more than a decade, drawing an influx of potential clients to retailers.

This year is even more promising than ever for digital retailers. After the massive digitalization that retailers underwent since the eruption of COVID-19, eCommerce has been thriving. Last year’s holiday season online shopping revenue exceeded $188.2 billion, and it’s only expected to grow in 2021. Whether it’s consumers searching for the best special sales or shop owners (that’s you) preparing and marketing them, everybody is involved in the holidays’ madness.

Unfortunately, not everyone involved is innocent. As traffic grows together with your customer’s wishlist, threat actors also contemplate their next big hit. The enormous traffic spike that the holidays bring makes it the perfect time for threat actors to execute their ill-natured plans. They search thoroughly for client-side vulnerabilities to exploit while composing malicious frameworks. If all goes according to their plan, you won’t notice their attack until it’s too late and the damage is done.

In recent years, client-side attacks gained popularity among threat actors. While most info-security systems today focus on the classical OWASP top 10 security threats, they protect the server while exposing the client-side attack surface.

However, you can significantly reduce your website vulnerabilities and guarantee happy holidays for your business and clients with just a few minor adjustments to your security.

4 Easy Steps to Protect Your Website for the Holidays

1. Import the necessary external scripts into your server

Nowadays, the average eCommerce website contains dozens of 3rd and 4th party applications, many open-source. It means they’re liable to modification by threat actors to gain access to your protected data.

A quick and easy way to ensure no one can mess with your website code is to localize trusted scripts and frameworks into your server. That way, the applications are not loaded on runtime, and thus they will be safe from malicious alterations. It won’t solve all the challenges, but it can help to reduce the risk.

2. Double-check Your checkout page

If you’re an eCommerce business, your checkout page is a hacker’s top target. It’s the best way to leak the most significant scale of the most valuable data, so it will attract attention from threat actors trying to steal your customer’s PII.

Since you probably don’t have the time or resources to check every page on your website, you should prioritize. Focus on your most valuable pages (the checkout page) and ensure no malicious activities or changes occur.

Ask your security team which scripts are running specifically on your Checkout page and what their function is. Don’t leave any room for doubt. If there’s no good answer, then you should reconsider their necessity. You can also read more on the critical vulnerabilities of 3rd-party applications.

3. Security team availability

Every minute counts at sensitive times such as the holiday season when threat actors are looking for their payday at your expense. Every second a security breach is left unaddressed spikes the damages up exponentially.

The time it takes for a security team to respond could make or break an enterprise. That is why building 24/7 shifts for your security team is required to ensure there’s always someone available to address any security threat as quickly as possible.

4. Use a tool to monitor irregularities in real-time

At this stage, we’ve already gone through the quickest steps to ensure your website’s safety for the holidays. However, it is essential to remember that risk management is a continuous task. No solution is permanent, as there are always threat actors working on evolving their methods.

Luckily, there are tools dedicated to tracking these elements in real time to notify you of every change in your website’s code. That way, you can effectively address any security threat and vulnerability raised by your 3rd-party code in real time.

Guard Your Holiday Customers and Revenue

The holidays are an excellent time for everybody. Families get together, people present each other with gifts, but most importantly, your sales revenue may prosper. However, don’t forget that amongst those highly anticipating the holidays, sophisticated threat actors also intend on ruining yours.

Make sure you’ve done all your power to protect your business client-side to ensure a safe and successful holiday for your business and clients.

Enjoy your holidays (safely)!

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