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How To Protect Your Magento Stores Against Ransomware Attacks

Moiz Khan Feb 20, 2017

As it says:  Prevention is better than Cure! The same goes here, safe your Magento eStore from Ransomware attacks.

If you are a retailer of an online store, then the safety of your store should be your first concern. You have to save your Magento store from all kind of online ransom attacks and cyber-extortions because this kind of attacks have now become so familiar that your Magento store can go through the worst situations.

What is Ransomware Attack??

The moment when the attacker has access to any website files, that are encrypted and are hidden somewhere on your server on the internet, is called ransomware attack.  Now these attackers hold the website owners for ransom. Payment is in the form of Bitcoins, the digital currency which is latest and popular in exchange, to retrieve your store data. When the retailer pays them, they will send the decryption key to decrypt the data which they encrypt when they hack the site. Else if the details don’t pay the attackers often increases the price.

Furthermore, in simple words, Ransomware are the attacks in which the precious data from your secret online server is kidnapped, and you are now asked to pay for ransom else you can lose all your data!

How to tell if the site is compromised or not.

The sample message is shown below when the data of your site is hacked or compromised for ransom.

ransom-attack

Pretty scary! isn’t it? To avoid such circumstances, the online retailers must save their files on servers in the first place. These are the attacks that are made on the profitable online venture, and thus, they have started to make the web stores very venerable.

Are Magento stores under threat?

As we all know about the popularity of Magento platform that many of the merchants use. According to a survey, many of the stores are making millions of dollars every day. That’s why this is the gold for the attackers.

But there are some ways through which you can save your store from these attacks.

By keeping your store and server up-to-date

Many of the ransomware attacks exploit all the vulnerabilities in the software on the server. These vulnerabilities can either be in the framework of the eCommerce application itself or may be can be in the underlying software stack.

But hey, if managed hosting provider hosts your store, they eventually will take care of these essential services and will make sure about the operating system is fully secured. But all you have to do is to apply some update to you e-Commerce application, and the extensions that you owned.

If we talk about the reports that are recently spate against these attacks against Magento stores, it is found that a relatively old and long patched vulnerability is to blame.

If you are a vivid user of Magento and you love this platform as your eCommerce store, we recommend you to follow Magento Security Center updates, about all the information regarding the timings when you have to apply patches to close security vulnerabilities.

Have some Backups

Ransom attackers strategy as mentioned earlier is to encrypt all your data. And once tbrutehe data is encrypted you can not decrypt without a decryption key; that’s what you needed. And when the data is encrypted you don’t have any access to your server. To have access to it, you have to pay the attackers.

To save the situation, regularly backup your data to a third-party service or offsite location, that assumption collapses. If you have a good backup plan, it will make sure to handle all types of disasters including these ransomware attacks.

Conclusion

Well, after knowing about the ransomware, the idea behind it is very frightening for those who have their store on Magento platform. Moderation advice is not different than any other malware risk. For the best practice, follow eCommerce Security best practices and just make sure that you have a robust backup plan and all your eggs are not in one basket.

Got any experience like this before? Share with us and tells others the way to get the situation under control.  Make sure to comment in below.

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