8 Tips to Secure Magento Website from Hackers

Is the issue of security of your Magento website making you worried? Magento is emerging as a powerful weapon for e-commerce web development due to its up to date features. According to the latest updates and market research, Magento’s market share has been reported to be 27%. Out of Alexa top 1 Million websites, above 34,000 have been developed using Magento. It shows that Magento is a leading and in demand e-commerce web development platform. In fact, when you plan to have your own e-commerce shopping website, then think of Magento at the first priority for several effective reasons.

Security of Magento based e-commerce websites is the biggest factor for providing protection against malicious attacks. This matchless e-commerce platform comes with numerous built-in security features that help keep your shopping website safe. You can make your e-commerce website even more secure by taking several security tips and steps into consideration. Through this post, we will point out crucial security policy along with hacking techniques that help secure your Magento website from hackers.

Suspicious activities involved in cyber crime include the following:

Techniques for hacking a website:

Some common techniques used by the hackers for hacking any website or an application have been figured out as follows:

SQL Injection

It is among the most preferred techniques used by the hackers. Through this technique, the hackers insert malicious SQL queries or statements in input given by the users. It results in damaging the back-end and allows access to the restricted areas by sending true Boolean values.

XSS (Cross-site Scripting)

This hacking technique is used for the web applications and targets the end users by lacking output validation.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attacks

DDoS technique features sending multiple requests at a time on the server, exceeding the capacity and making the website unavailable. Hackers disturb definite functions of the website through this technique.

Session Management and Breaking Authentication

This technique is used to weaken the authentication and emphasize on session IDs as well as cookies, so that it becomes quite easy for the hackers to access your account.

Remote Command Execution

With the help of this technique, the hackers execute commands when there is improper input validation.

Security tips to protect Magento website from Hackers

The various security tips that help protect your Magento based e-commerce website from hackers’ attacks have been illustrated below:

1. Upgrade to the latest version of Magento:

With every new version release, Magento improves its features and fixes the existing bugs in the website. Therefore, upgrade your Magento website to the latest version as it comes with better functionality and security.

2. Choose complex password and username:

Primary target of the hackers is to find out the admin password and username. So, choose complex username and password of minimum 10 characters each. Use both lower and capital letters along with special characters as well as numbers. Never use any sequence of number, name or date of birth as they make your password and username weak. According to a report, the sequence 123456 was used by most of the business owners in 2013.

3. One password for one account:

Most of the entrepreneurs make a common mistake that to remember easily they use same password for accessing all their accounts. Never access your professional and personal accounts with the same password. This activity increases the possibility of getting your password and username hacked with ease. So, always try to keep a unique password for every account.

4. Change the passwords at frequent interval:

Don’t use the same passwords throughout the life. The admin has to change the passwords every 3 month. Even if the hackers have hacked your previous passwords, regular changes will make it useless.

5. Access restriction to unsecured FTP:

For improving security of your Magento website, allow access restriction to unsecured FTP by using .htaccess and httpd.conf files.

6. Never assign 777 file permissions:

Never keep the permissions of your crucial files to 777 once you perform the changes.

7. Backup the website on regular basis:

Backup your Magento website on regular basis to strengthen its security. Use an active backup plan to ensure that services will not be interrupted even the website gets hacked.

8. Get a regular security review:

The business owners are advised to get a regular security review by the trained Magento security experts.

We hope that these above-described security tips will make your Magento e-commerce shopping website safe as well as future proof. Magento is itself a highly secure e-commerce web development platform, but to make it more sound these tips appear extremely significant.

This article is written by Paul Schroer. He is a talented web developer and blogger at PSDtoMagentoDeveloper, a company that provides the best custom Magento development services. He has shared his creative ideas and knowledge for solving several issues regarding the website hosting. He is also enthusiast for sharing valuable posts specially the website development.Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.