Keep orders flowing with customer safety
So you have built up a pretty good consumer base for your ecommerce site. With several large cyber attacks and stolen credit information here are a few ideas for your e-commerce site and a few for your shoppers. After all if you can help keep their information safe they can feel more secure shopping on your site.
While your password rules may not require much in the way of a password that doesn't mean you shouldn't educate your prospects and customers alike. When signing up for your site offer suggestions on how customers can make their passwords more secure. Add a link below the password line to everyplace a prospect has to enter a password on your site to explain more secure password options. Make it obvious if you offer 2 factor authentication. Then you can offer the following as just a few ideas on better passwords.
Use or create Passwords that are hard to guess this may sound simple but a lot of people struggle trying to remember unique passwords. This means don't use simple password such as 123, pets name, birth date, spouses names, kids names or the like.
IF you are like us then you need to have many passwords so use passwords easy to remember.
Criminals have developed highly sophisticated hacks to guess your password including birth dates, pets names, and 123 combinations.
Use different passwords for different sites. Its not that hard based on what you have learned above. But if you still think you may have trouble remembering all your password, consider using a password manager that can securely manager your passwords for you. Check with an expert for recommendations on secure password manages. They should encrypt your passwords not only on the screen but they should store them in memory encrypted. This way you only have to remember 1 password to manager. I recommend staying away from offering suggestions on a good password manager.
There are other things you can do like keeping server passwords in a vault and requiring server password changes every 30 days or less. But will save some of the more detailed solutions for the security architects.
You want your password to be as strong as possible and the longer your password is, the stronger it is. Instead of using a single word consider a passphrase like " Time to eat" . This is only a pretty good password. if you can use a number and lower/upper and then use a symbol in your password you go from good to great. As an example. Time 2 E@t this is much harder for cybercriminals to guess but still easy for you to remember. You can also make unique easy to remember passwords buy using a few simple tricks like. Always start the password with the first 5 characters of the site you are visiting. for example if you are visting amazon.com your unique password that is easy to remember could be amazo Time 2 e@t or you could replace any part of your phrase with the site name. This helps with the next tip below.
Tell your shoppers to Never share a password with anyone else. Not their family, friends, or even clergy. IF you accidently do then change your password immediately.Recommend that your shoppers not use public computers to login to your site, These could have easily been infected with software that will capture their login information and send it back to cyber criminals without you ever knowing.
If you did give out your password or if you think your password was stolen, change it immediately, if you use the same password for several sites change all of them(this is a good time to use a new pass phrase like I mention above).
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If you are no longer using an account delete it or disable that account. Left over dead accounts can get breached and your data retrieved and use on other sites.
While we are at it there are a few things you as the vendor can do to help safeguard your customers data. It is also good to tell your customers you take these steps if you have the real estate.
First use HTTPS yes S for secure. Group all personal info and credit info so the code that executes that is housed on a different server than your standard application. THis entire separate server should be encrypted from the network connections down to the data on the disk. many financial institutions may require this but even if they dont. Do it for your customers only if you want to keep them safe.
If you have other password or security tips post them in the comments, help keep your customers, your site and applications safe and keep your customers coming back.
