November 15, 2010
Internet has become our second home. Most of the time we are either on a social networking sites busy sharing information or networking with friends, or on online newspaper portal simply reading latest headlines, or on chat messengers or may be just surfing various online shopping portals for buying products. All this need to share information over the net. As webmasters, it becomes very important to have proper measures in place to protect confidential information of users, specially when you run an online shopping store. In an online shopping store, for successful order placement, it is important to seek personal and financial information from users. This information is to be kept secure at all times.
For online shopping portals, the security threats are even more. People choose products and pay for them through merchants gateways. As confidential information like credit card number, name, address and email id is shared, it is important to protect them. There are two ways of taking payments online.
First option is where when the user clicks on “Buy Now” button, he is taken to a third party website of merchant gateway. The secure gateway webpage asks for personal and financial information and processes the payment. After payment the user is returned back to the original shopping portal. In such a scenario, the information is neither shared nor stored on shopping website. All information is processed by merchant gateway engine. It becomes very important to use only reliable payment gateways who have all security measures in place.
Second option is where personal and financial information is taken on the shopping website itself and payment is processed either by personalized merchant gateway or through third party merchant gateway. Here webmaster’s responsibility gets very high as he needs to make sure that personal and financial information is kept secure and out of reach of any miscreants. As a webmaster, you should choose web servers that are secure and safe. It is a good practice to buy dedicated web hosting servers from reliable company for the same.
In case of shopping websites, webmaster should buy and install SSL on the cart, registration section and payment processing sections of the website. This ensures that only encrypted data is processed.
As a webmaster, you should make sure that only authorized personnel deals with databases. It is a good practice to keep information at different locations and that too in encrypted form. Your web server or physical server should have proper firewalls and security measures installed to counter any cyber attacks. Do make sure that all softwares are regularly updated.
It is a good practice to rope in a cyber security consultant who can plan and help you in setting up completely secure environment for your application. We at Centex Technologies provide consultation and advanced tools to help you prevent any misuse of personal and financial information of your clients. Contact us today at (254) 213-4740
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