If you’re a Shopify store owner, you should be thinking about protecting your shopify store from being hacked. How do hackers get into our stores? How can we stop them?
As a result of security negligence, some of the most well-known Shopify merchants have lost thousands of dollars in sales and their valuable clients.
Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of 7 things that any Shopify merchant should know when protecting their storefronts and products from being stolen by hackers using data breaches.
It’s critical to consider the security of your online store and clients if you’re an ecommerce manager or run a large company brand. Neglecting security might hurt your company and clients.
If your online store’s security isn’t at the top of your list, it should be.
Shopify ensures that merchants and consumers are safe by automatically requiring each store to be PCI-compliant.
It is also essential to consider how a store’s security measures may differ.
Shopify, on the other hand, is just another third-party merchant. The responsibility of safeguarding your shop lies with Shopify and you, the vendor.
Shopify maintains the platform’s software infrastructure and disaster recovery.
Your Shopify store is hosted by Shopify. Merchants are responsible for site security, 3rd-party applications, and data backup.
According to Hosting Tribunal, Approximately 87% of businesses have six or more third-party applications installed on their website. Because third-party applications are frequently subject to hacking, some apps put merchants in danger of data breaches, intellectual property theft, and content losses.
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What could possibly go wrong?
In reality, it’s pretty awful.
SweetLegs, a legging company using WooCommerce, went bankrupt after losing six figures in sales during a Black Friday data breach.
Gymshark, a merchant selling sports and fitness apparel, estimated a loss of over $143,000 after their Magento site went down On Black Friday.
International Military Antiques (IMA) was hacked shortly before switching to Shopify Plus, and their clients’ data was targeted and scraped.
They spent thousands of dollars to restore the website to a basic level of security, but their customers’ data had already been stolen.
How to Protect Your Shopify Store?
The truth is all ecommerce stores are at risk of being hacked.
There’s no such thing as 100% protection! How do you protect yourself?
Here are 7 things that will help you to protect your shopify store from hackers and data breaches:
- Secure your essential store data
- Tighten Your account-level security
- Have an activated SSL Certificate
- Use an automated backup solution
- Implement Version control for your Shopify store’s technical side
- Fraud Prevention Tips
- Lock Restricted Content
Let us dive into each one of them now.
1. Secure your basic store data from content mockingbirds
Many eCommerce firms and small companies forget to safeguard their hard work after they’ve built their business. Nobody is safe, though.
It’s simple to obtain pictures from the internet these days, copy and paste a perfect replica, or steal important information about an online company.
Why would your competition succeed on the back of your hard work if you have a solution that delivers protection in minutes and keeps everything secure?
You no longer have to waste time on coding forums to keep your website and business safe. You may quickly prevent folks from stealing from your store with just a few minutes work.
You may put in place a series of measures to prevent evildoers from executing certain activities. You can turn every element on or off with the touch of a button.
Right-click protection
You can prevent your images, texts, input fields, and links from being copied by turning off right-clicking on your store. This also prevents reverse image searches.
Hiding your themes name
Do you want to retain the visual appearance of your business and avoid online mockery birds? The first step toward ensuring that is hiding your theme’s name.
Blocking shortcuts use
Blocking the most popular shortcuts will prevent people from taking undesirable actions on your website.
These are just a few popular shortcuts that can shred your business to pieces.
Drag & drop protection
If you keep your images and store elements safe, you should prevent drag and drop immediately. This feature is often used together with preventing right clicks and using shortcuts.
Blocking text selection
Are you happy with the product descriptions and website text? Simply turn off text selection, and it’ll be much more difficult for others to steal your intellectual property.
If you follow the above tasks, it not only adds an extra layer of protection for your store but also prevents your products from being reverse image searched, thus keeping your store’s integrity intact.
2. Tighten Your account-level security
Many people use the same password for numerous accounts. They frequently use it with the same username or email address.
If a username/password combination is exposed, an attacker may obtain access to other accounts that use the same login and password.
Password vault software is a fantastic tool for generating and maintaining passwords. The master key to a password vault is all you need to remember, as your other passwords will be autogenerated jumbles of letters, numbers, and symbols.
With a password vault, you will always have unique passwords. The most popular password vaults are LastPass, Dashlane, and 1password.
Protect your account against phishing
Phishing is a type of fraud in which criminals attempt to deceive you into downloading harmful malware onto your device or providing away sensitive data.
Phishing is a type of identity theft in which scammers create fake websites and emails, or other communications to obtain personal information from you.
A phishing scam aims to get access to your account and personal information.
An attacker may develop a fake website that resembles a reputable one or send you an email that appears to be from a respected source.
Messages from a phony account or an account that has been hijacked are examples of phishing.
A phishing email might request that you complete the following actions:
- Visit a link.
- Download a file.
- Open an attachment.
If you do any of these things, your computer or mobile device may be infected with malware. Malicious software such as worms, trojans, bots, and viruses.
An intruder may access your personal information if your device is infected.
Direct requests for personal information, such as bank account credentials, are another variation of phishing scams.
Even requesting that you enter your email address and reset your password is risky.
Secure your account with two-step authentication
Two-step verification is a type of authentication that requires two steps to complete.
You may enable two-step authentication for your Shopify account to prevent any damage.
Two-step verification is also available for your employees’ accounts.
Whenever feasible, use two-step authentication on your other accounts.
Services that provide this security include:
- Amazon
- Apple
- Microsoft
3. Have an activated SSL Certificate
Make sure your store has an SSL certificate. It ensures user’s data transport security through encrypted communication channels and protects the site from hacking attempts like man-in-the-middle attacks.
Shopify encrypts sensitive data when it’s stored, and the entire checkout process is SSL encrypted.
How does this work?
Shopify automatically sends an order ID to your payment gateway after a customer has completed their purchase online through PayPal or Stripe (your credit card processor).
These gateways use this order ID to find the record of a customer’s purchase from your Shopify store.
In addition, Shopify encrypts credit card data when sent from customers’ browsers to our servers using strong encryption protocols like SSL and TLS (Transport Layer Security).
All connections to your Shopify admin and store are secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) on Shopify.
TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a type of encryption that protects online communications.
If the address bar of your browser displays a padlock symbol next to a URL that begins with https://, the connection is using TLS.
Shopify’s security configuration is determined by the certificate you select, so everything to do with Shopify is protected. Your own connections and your customers’ connections are all subject to TLS.
The terms TLS and SSL are still used interchangeably, despite the fact that TLS replaced the older SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol. To summarize, an SSL certificate is simply a TLS certificate.
How do you check if your site has an SSL certificate?
Enter your store’s URL by opening your browser. If SSL is enabled, you’ll see a small padlock icon or green text that indicates that “This Connection Is Secure.”
How to enable an SSL certificate for your Shopify store?
The first step is to get an SSL certificate for your Store.
You can get one directly from the Shopify admin area or via third-party services like Cloudflare, which offers free SSL certificates that are automatically enabled on all custom domains connected to your account.
An active SSL certificate will enable security features in every possible area of your Shopify store.
4. Use an automated backup solution
The storage capacity of Shopify’s hosting infrastructure is second to none, and it is extremely well-architected. On the other hand, this does not keep your intern from unintentionally deleting all of your website’s content or overwriting your theme.
It’s necessary to have an automated backup solution like Goshu Backup and Restore App to mitigate any ‘oops’ event that might occur within your team.
Using this you can set up recurring backups for almost every aspect of your Shopify store, including items, inventory, customers, blog entries, and more.
5. Implement Version control for your Shopify store’s technical side
Shopify provides a range of tutorials on using the theme editor and some getting started recommendations that are worth reviewing for any merchant considering modifying their theme code directly.
However, merchants wanting to get serious about editing their theme’s code should consider adopting some code management rules.
You’ll also want to look at a version control system like Git, as well as anything from the Shopify CLI (a local command-line tool).
Creating daily backups of your theme, restricting access to only those individuals who are actually editing theme code, and/or testing modifications before deploying them is at the very least a good start for avoiding problems with your theme.
6. Fraud Prevention Tips
Shopify Plus merchants can use enhanced security features such as Shopify Flow and Fraud Protect to help them prevent fraudulent transactions.
You can also use Shopify’s basic fraud detection solution, which is sufficient for most small businesses. You’ll want to look into a more advanced fraud detection tool like NS8, or thirdwatch if you want to go beyond what Shopify provides.
These technologies aid in the detection of order fraud, advertising fraud, and overall performance failure.
It’s a premium solution that comes with all of the features you need. It works with virtually any Shopify theme and doesn’t require any code changes or additional apps to function.
7. Lock Restricted Content
Depending on your company, you may need to restrict access to certain products, content, or portions of your website.
A service like Locksmith may help you tackle all of these challenges, whether it’s to set yourself apart from the competition, appeal to investors, or offer members-only access.
The app enables you to create a number of “lockdown restrictions” to assist you in regulating your store’s overall access and security.
Conclusion
The security of data is essential, regardless of who you’re selling to, what type of product you’re working with, or whether or not you’re using any apps.
You need insurance to protect your online store, just as you do for a physical one. We propose utilizing at least three of the aforementioned security measures.
You can prevent your reputation, data, and content from being stolen by following the steps in this article to run a safe online store. Aside from that, you will notice a boost in sales, save time and money on personnel resources, and reduce expenses.
Have you already implemented any of the solutions suggested? Which security Tips are your favorites? Please let us know in the comments.
