[BreachExchange] 5 Tips to Make your Online Business Secure from Hackers

[Audrey McNeil]

https://www.hackread.com/5-tips-to-make-your-online-
business-secure-from-hackers/

If you are an entrepreneur who runs an online business, your digital
properties including your website, social media accounts and emails are the
backbones of your business operations. You need to make sure that your data
is protected from hackers and your digital properties are running smoothly
without any external threats or disturbances.

Over the years the internet security protocols have become much stricter
than what they used to be in the earlier days. Unfortunately, over the same
time period, malicious hackers and cybercriminals have also grown to become
smarter and have developed new tactics that can breach even the most
efficient systems.

Even large corporate giants and sensitive government websites have not been
able tokeep themselves completely safe from such attacks. Data leaks are
still a huge issue for many large businesses. Under such circumstances, a
small scale entrepreneur cannot risk a cyber attack or a hacking bit that
can possibly put an end to his business for good. If you own an online
business, here are 5 tips that will help you keep your online business safe
from hackers.

Automated Updates

The biggest weakness of most small entrepreneurs is that they tend to avoid
system updates and hackers are aware of this. As a result, they become an
easy target of such attacks. It is important that you not only update your
operating systems but also update software, applications, website plugins
and any other ancillary service that might require an update.

Updates help to remove bugs and make your digital properties more secure. A
smarter move is to set your system settings for automated updates. That way
your system will get updated automatically as soon as an update will be
released, even if you miss them out.

Multi-Layer Security

Gaining access control of your website’s control panel is one of the most
common ways that cyber attackers use. If you lose your website’s access
control to a hacker, there will not be much that you would be able to do
and you can easily lose control over your business. It is, therefore,
necessary to tighten up access control.

Add multi-layer security and make passwords difficult to guess. The longer
and the more difficult alphanumeric passwords are there, the better it will
be. Limit the number of logins attempted for an additional layer of
security.

Protect Your Website’s SEO

As an online business, you must be aware how important SEO is to your
business success and revenue generation. It is your website’s SEO that
helps your business stay into the picture and keep it up in the Google’s
rating. If your website is attacked, Google can flag it for malware and
will even penalize you. The website will redirect your customers to other
malware websites and you will end up losing both, your customers and your
Google ratings.

As an online business, you cannot take that risk. Moreover, many online
entrepreneurs are not too tech savvy and they use third-party CMS services
such as WordPress to operate their websites. This limits your control on
the website and makes it more vulnerable to Cyber attackers.

As an entrepreneur, you might not be tech savvy enough to address these
issues and it would be wise to hire a professional SEO company who can help
you protect your SEO. Ask your SEO company or website developer to add an
SSL certificate on your website to protect it from malware.

Fraud Protection

As an online business, a credit card fraud being associated with your
business could be your worst nightmare. It can be very difficult for you to
be able to detect fraudulent credit card transactions because hackers and
cyber thieves use different methods of payment frauds.

Luckily, there are payment fraud protection tools available that can flag
suspicious credit card transactions and can protect your business from a
data breach or a major financial loss. Payment protection tools can help
you in many ways. These tools flag suspicious payment activities such as
mismatched payment information, repeated orders from the same customers
using different credit cards and credit card chargeback frauds.

Disable AutoFill

The convenience of auto-fill cannot be undermined. Filling the same
information in long forms at multiple websites can be very annoying and can
put off users and therefore many website users prefer using auto fill
option.

However, it can be very risky if a computer or a device gets stolen and an
unauthorized person gains access to your auto-fill information. A recent
example is LinkedIn autofill flaw putting personal data of millions of
users at risk.It is, therefore, safe to make an extra effort instead of
being lazy and take the risk.
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