8 Important Tips to Protect Your Magento Store from Hacking

Protection of eCommerce and financial websites is necessary because these websites deal with monetary transactions and stand first as a victim in the list of cyber crime. Magento is the most popular eCommerce platform which also comes under threat of hacking by accessing unauthorized logins and other attacks. Magento Platform is rich in security features but security is needed on the admin level to protect it from cyber criminals.

Here are some security tips that help you to protect your Magento store and keep your site safe:

1.Admin Path Customization:

It is the first step you can take to keep your Magento site safe is to customize the admin path because the normal login pages and admin pages can easily be accessed by just hit and trial methods and it is very easy to navigate to admin page by hackers if the path remains unchanged. With the use of many hacking software available online, it is easy to guess user name and password combinations and these software can guess user name and password combinations 8 million times a second.

2.Use Strong Admin Username and Password: 

Always choose strong password combination because if your password is general and easy to guess then it will be easily accessible by hackers in no time. Idea password must include uppercase letters, lower case letters, special characters and numbers and it should be a length of min 15 characters. By including all these combinations it is not accessible by hackers and even software because it will take years to find the exact match.

3.Do not use Magento Store Password anywhere else:

 If you have created a good password combination for Magento Store admin login then it is recommended that it should not be used in another website login or for any login panel. Many people use same password for different services login and it is really harmful because it increases the risk of accessing all of your account and losing all accounts at once. So always choose different password for different services.

4.Regular Update Magento Platform:

Updating Magento Platform after a certain time is a good technique to make your Magento store more secure because the latest version adds more functionality every time and adds more security factors by analyzing the previous version complaints to make it more stable. So if you are using the updated version of Magento software then you can easily rid off several security threats.

5. Use HTTPS/SSL for all login pages: 

HTTPS and SSL are the protocols used for web for the encryption of website data that sent from the browser to server and vice versa. By using the data in encrypted format, we can save our magento store from the hackers. For the HTTPS/SSL security we have to follow the below steps:

• Access the “System” tab from the main toolbar
• Choose “Configuration” from the drop down menu
• Click on the “Web” tab in the left.
• Then choose “Secure” in the main window
• Now change the Base URL of your store from http://… to https://… 
• Select “yes” for both “Use Secure URLs in Frontend" and "Use Secure URLs in Admin”. 
• click the “Save Config” button at the top of the page

6. Use Two level Authentication: 

With the strong password combination, you can also use the two level or multi level authentications that makes your Magento website more secure and reduces the maximum chances of getting hacked. Magento store offers a wide variation of extensions such as Rublon that is available in Magento connect Market which helps you to use two or multi level verification so that you can make yourself more satisfiable….

7. Use SFTP instead of FTP:

FTP is the protocol that was used earlier stages of internet when security was not the major issue. Now it is recommended to use SFTP because FTP authorization can be accessed easily because of plain text and SFTP is more secure protocol because it will relive you from the IP screaming issues.

8. Restrict Admin Access:

It is also a good precaution; you can take to secure your Magento store in some way. Restrict your Magento admin access to only the selected IP addresses so that only allowable IPs can access the admin page. This can be done by using the .htaccess file and it is recommended to use apache directive location match.

Author Bio: Anna Brown is a graduate from Delhi University, India and has a very keen interest in web designing and development industry. She is a real passionate web designer who loves her work and enjoys it because her basic interest falls only in designing. She loves to design new faces for the companies she works with. Do not forget to catch her on Facebook and you can also follow her on Twitter.