In a nutshell, it involves protecting both the sensitive information your business collects (customer payment information, personal data, and login credentials) and the communications you send to customers (order confirmations, password resets, promotional emails). But what specific threats do ecommerce businesses face? Let’s take a look.
Phishing emails that spoof your legitimate business communications are a severe form of identity theft for businesses. Customers get an email that looks just like your branding (colors, logo, etc.) and goes straight to a malicious website controlled by the attackers, where they steal credentials.
The sad truth is that people use the same passwords across many different websites. Attackers take username and password combos leaked from other breaches and try them against your admin panel, customer accounts, and anything else they can find.
This is delightfully diabolical. After compromising a user account, attackers create inbox rules that auto-forward messages, delete notifications, or move security alerts to trash. Even when your security team sends a “suspicious login detected” alert, the compromised user may never see it because it’s auto-deleted.
OAuth is the framework that makes those "Sign in with Google" buttons possible. Attackers trick users into granting permissions to their malicious apps, which can then access the user's email, contacts, and any other data that the OAuth request exposed, and they do this all without actually stealing a password.
When attackers compromise an administrator account, they've got access to customer data, the ability to modify products and descriptions, and control over the entire storefront.
This is when attackers inject malicious code into the checkout process/payment page to skim credit card details as customers enter them. The customer experiences the checkout process just as they normally would, while attackers are making a copy of everything they type.
DMARC, SPF, and DKIM are the tools and protocols that let a receiving email server authenticate messages coming from you.
Together, these three form your first line of defense against brand spoofing. When you set them up properly, they make it a lot more difficult for an attacker to send out phishing emails that appear to come from your domain.
Email authentication, like DMARC, SPF, and DKIM, is essential. However, once an attacker compromises a user account, they have the ability to create mailbox forwarding and deletion rules that can completely bypass the email authentication layer.
To prevent these attacks, monitor inbox rules across your organization and set up alerts when someone creates new forwarding rules, especially to external domains (customer inquiries that need a response suddenly get auto-forwarded to the attacker's Gmail). This type of activity isn't normal and indicates a compromise.
More best practices for securing ecommerce messages include:
Use consistent, recognizable sending domains for all customer communications. You don't want to send some emails from your primary support address and others from unrelated third-party domains. It's easier for customers to spot fake emails, and it's easier to implement the right email authentication when your sending domains are consistent and recognizable.
Alert on communication anomalies. An account in your email marketing platform logging into the system from an unusual location at 3 AM when it's outside your organization's normal business hours isn't suspicious by itself, but it does deserve escalation. The same goes for sudden volume spikes in email sending, unexpected changes to email templates, or sending from domains with modified sender reputation.
Most customer data and message security come from inside your own back office. That means you need strong authentication on every admin panel and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for anyone with elevated privileges.
Implement least privilege access. The best way to protect customer data and messages is to make sure everyone has the access they need and nothing more.
Collect logs from everywhere, all the time, and aggregate those logs in a way that allows you to quickly and easily search and make sense of them. Your storefront platform logs, payment gateway logs, customer relationship management (CRM) system logs, and identity provider (IdP) logs are where you store the evidence.
When something suspicious happens, those logs let you reconstruct the attack, understand the scope, and provide audit trails that prove to regulators that you actually had all the security controls in place that you said you had.
While frameworks and solutions vary, ecommerce environments need these four types of data security the most:
Data and message security in ecommerce needs solutions that detect attacks early and respond quickly to shut them down. Huntress Managed EDR includes behavioral endpoint detection to catch malware and suspicious behavior on endpoints before they become full breaches. Managed SIEM collects and correlates logs from across your infrastructure to create a single pane of glass for security events. Managed ITDR specifically targets identity-based attacks, which are increasingly the weapon of choice for cybercriminals targeting ecommerce operations, plus it includes 24/7 monitoring of critical systems by security engineers.
Book a demo of the Huntress platform and give cybercriminals a headache instead of your customers’ data.
Why Retail Workers Need Cybersecurity Awareness and Training
