By Dan Radak, Crucial Hosting Company
The Internet opened a new commerce market and new possibilities for profit, but also brought new challenges for entrepreneurs. Naturally, the issue of safety is a big one when it comes to ecommerce. In simpler words, with new types of commerce and new type of shops come new types of thieves. That is why the ecommerce security has become a very interesting field for safety experts. This field is growing and many people work on making the Internet a safer place for commerce. Some of their efforts will be seen in 2015.
This is the protection from something that is called Distributed Denial of Service Attack. In simple words, that is the type of attack that involves flooding the server and causing the online website to become crippled and entirely useless to the end-user. When these types of attack appear, the targets are usually gambling sites and other types of entertainment sites, but ecommerce sites, as well. Today, the defense of these kind of attack is more complex, but the hackers and attackers have evolved as well. For small businesses and their sites, the best option to secure themselves from these kinds of attacks is to hire companies that exclusively deal with this type of security and they will make backup plans that will ensure that the site is fully operational within seconds. In this case, outsourcing is the answer in 2015.
Naturally, when it comes to running an online business, it is necessary to be sure that the payment system is fully secure and operational. In 2015, small businesses will need to make sure that they have the latest possible version of SSL Certificate. This functions as a padlock on the files and data transferred. Also, it secures the credit card details and logins. It consists of files that contain domain name, location, organization, server name and hostname. All that data needs to be verified before transaction. The trend in 2015 regarding SSL Certificate will gravitate toward more complex and diverse encryption.
These six letters actually stand for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This standard is an insurance that all the companies that have anything to do with the online payment and related data are completely secure. This is as simple as it can possibly be broken down. In the 2015, the latest version, DDS 3.0 is expected to take effect. The changes that will happen in this version are addressing responsibility, level of awareness and "business as usual". In previous versions, the responsibility somewhat hang somewhere in between the merchants and server providers. Now, the shared responsibility is established. As for level of awareness, the new version attempt to ensure that the technology used by the company is not the only factor of security and that the environment of security extends throughout the company. "Business as usual" is the initiative to make the DSS something that is taken care of continuously within a company.
It seems like common sense to make sure that all the software is up to date. However, when it comes to running ecommerce sites this is of the outmost importance. The security needs to be flawless and there are tons of malicious attempts at all time to find flaws in all the above mentioned security systems. Therefore, there are teams and teams of people making sure that there are constant upgrades and patches to the existing systems that keep them up to date. However, they are useless if the owners of the online businesses don't pay attention to them. In 2015, the development of these patches is likely to get sped up, so it will be necessary to keep up to date.
It seems like the hackers and the malicious elements are getting more and more creative day by day. However, for every problem that they create, there are experts that find the way to block it and seal that security breach. The following year will definitely have some pretty much unpredictable security challenges, but these above mentioned systems should be enough for most online businesses.
About the author: Dan Radak is a Web hosting security professional with 10 years' of experience. He currently works with a number of companies in the field of online security, closely collaborating with Crucial Hosting Company. He is also a co-author on several technology websites.