The Most Common Threats for Online Merchants

The Most Common Threats for Online Merchants

The e-commerce market is expected to reach nearly $5 trillion globally in 2021. In such an environment, alongside unlimited opportunities for online merchants, there are also numerous dangers that put both small and large businesses, online stores, and their customers at risk. In this article, we will review the current threats to online merchants and provide valuable advice for protection.

What are the most widespread cyber threats to e-commerce businesses?

    1. DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service, aim to prevent users from accessing a certain website. These are malicious attacks launched by pre-programmed software that artificially floods the network with traffic and requests to the server hosting your site. The attack can continue until the server becomes overloaded and your websites become inaccessible. The downside of DDoS attacks is that they are easy to carry out, can last for a long time, and can make your site unreachable for an extended period. This means that any competitor or simply a malicious user can harm your online business and reputation. 
You know well that every minute your online store is unavailable means missed opportunities, sales, and profits. Site loading issues lead to a lower rating, putting you at a disadvantage compared to your competitors. Most often, online stores in popular consumer categories are the target of DDoS attacks, and the initiators can mask themselves well, making them impossible to trace.

    2. Information Theft. Stealing confidential, personal, and banking data.
This threat poses a huge risk to the reputation of any online business. For hackers, sites that process sensitive data, such as personal information, bank card details, etc., are the most attractive. Even global companies that manage large volumes of data experience challenges in preventing theft and hacker attacks. The leakage of such information can happen as a result of a targeted attack or an accidental human error. Often, the root cause is a lack of or insufficient security measures. 

    3. Gaining administrative access to the site and control over the content
Another action from which malicious users or your competitors could benefit and which you must protect yourself against. In this scenario, they could change the content on your sites and harm your clients and users. If you do not rely on professional maintenance for your website or online store and lack a reliable hosting provider, such a threat poses a high risk of lasting negative consequences.

How can you protect yourself?

If you remain passive against these most common cyber threats, it is very likely that your online business will suffer at some point. Fortunately, there is a solution, and it consists of using professional hosting solutions. Modern Cloud hosting services are designed to protect your online store and ensure its smooth and continuous operation. When choosing a reliable hosting provider, pay attention to:
    • Reserved server resources – The main drawback of the most common shared hosting is that you share resources with all other web projects hosted on the same server as your online store. In this case, an increase in traffic, a cyber attack, or a bad reputation of another site on the shared server will automatically result in difficulties for your own website’s operation. This often leads to total inaccessibility for your online store’s clients. Unlike shared hosting, Cloud VPS servers guarantee reserved resources only for your sites and much more flexibility in their use. Cloud servers are more resilient to online attacks and offer backup server resources for you to use when needed.
    • Daily backups – At any moment, a malicious attack against your site or even a simple hardware problem could wipe out vital data for your business and clients. It is essential that the hosting service you use offers daily backups of all data and files, so you can quickly restore them if necessary. Even in cases of accidental or deliberate deletion, loss, or alteration of data, professional hosting solutions provide ways to recover them. 
    • Professional protection and support – Server support and protection against DDoS attacks, and not only that, is no longer just an extra but rather an essential part of any online business. Good hosting providers are responsible for daily monitoring of processes on their servers, identifying potential threats and hacker attacks, and taking preventive measures.

AbsCloud Cloud Services Offer All the Solutions

The focus of our Cloud hosting solutions is the specific needs of each online merchant. AbsCloud provides everything necessary for the seamless, fast, and secure operation of online stores in a protected environment that guards against all well-known and dangerous cyber attacks. Key advantages of Cloud VPS hosting from AbsCloud for online stores are:
    • Server resources guaranteed exclusively for you
    • Security and company data protection
    • Proactive professional support and system administration
    • Guaranteed connectivity and 99.9% uptime guarantee
    • Flexible management and control over resources and costs
    • Free additional services – migration, domain, SSL certificate, monitoring, 24/7 support.

Our cloud technologies allow us to offer individual server solutions tailored to the specific needs of your business. Contact us for a consultation now.
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