An Overview of Magento Built-in Security Features

Security is the most important aspect of the e-commerce industry. It is vital that all the transactions, as well as the customer data, are prevented from potential e-commerce frauds. Magento, being one of the modern e-commerce platforms, helps in reducing the possible security hazards through its built-in tools that make it easier for you to achieve visibility, seamless key operations and control over different activities across your Magento store.

In this blog, I will be giving you a thorough rundown on Magento’s built in security features that will help you secure your e-commerce ecosystem. Considering the e-commerce security climate, Magento has developed an array of vigorous security features that benefits online retailers profoundly.

Have a look below for a detailed study:

Enhanced password management

As we all know, passwords are the most common mode of shield when it comes to cybersecurity and also are the most vulnerable and easiest to defeat. Generally, different organizations are setting up certain password standards to overcome such problems, however it still doesn’t solve the problem completely.

With this in mind, Magento has strengthened the hashing algorithms, SHA-256, in its password management. This has secured users and site administrators to a great extent.

Prevention of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks

One of the other features of Magento includes the prevention of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by making escaped data default, hence making your Magento store more secured. The Magento framework has adopted certain conventions that regulate the escaping of data in the output. These conventions include the ability to escape output for HTML pages (HTML, JSON, and JavaScript), as well as emails. Where possible, escaping is transparent to the client code as well. You can see the security measures against XSS attacks in the Frontend Developer Guide.

Flexible file system ownership and permissions

To help prevent issues related to unauthorized people or processes potentially causing harm to your Magento store, it is recommended that certain files and directories are kept read-only in a production environment and writable in a development environment. Please note that Magento does not explicitly sets file system permissions.

Prevention of click jacking exploits

With many other security features, Magento also safeguards your store from clickjacking attacks by using an X-Frame-Options HTTP request header.

Use of non-default Magento Admin URL

A simple Magento Admin URL (like admin or backend) makes it easier to target attacks on specific locations using automated password guessing. To prevent your store from such attack, Magento by default creates a random Admin URL when you install any product. The CLI is also provided to change this URL, if required, as well as to see the password in case you forgot. Although, the use of a non-default Admin URL does not secure the site, but it helps in preventing large-scale automated attacks on your Magento site.

For further details, you can refer to:

<ahref=”http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/architecture/security_intro.html”>http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.0/architecture/security_intro.html

Advanced Security Measures

Some of the advanced security measures that you should consider in order to prevent your Magento store from unauthorized access and security lapses are:

Admin Name and Password

To prevent unauthorized access to your account, it is highly recommended that you use a complex Admin name and a strong password. This ensures that attackers cannot guess or simply use the default name to try and login to your account. Just use a combination of uppercase, lowercase, symbols, and numbers to create a strong password that is difficult to guess.

Update to the Latest Version of Magento 2

The best way to ward off any sort of e-commerce frauds is to keep your Magento site up-to-date. Make sure that you update your Magento 2 to the latest version to avoid any security lapses. Every Magento update improves security through patches and killing known vulnerabilities.

Apply Regular Security Patches

The most basic way to keep your site secure is to routinely check for new security patches that can be applied to your site. Patches and version upgrades are regularly released to address vulnerabilities found in the platform. Upgrading your Magento store to the most recent version, along with applying all security patches, helps in keeping your site secure from reported vulnerabilities and those looking out to exploit them.

For example, a recent security patch, SUPEE-9767, addresses security breaches such as remote code execution in the Admin panel and uploading images with malicious code, if configuration settings are set to allow symlinks.

For all latest security patches, you can refer to:

https://magento.com/security

Two-Step Verification

Two-step verification protects your account by requiring additional verification from the user when signing in to the Admin Panel. In this process, after signing in to the account, a security code is sent to the Admin’s mobile number or email address, which the user has to verify in order to access the Admin panel. It works as an additional security layer, which makes it difficult for the attackers to cause any harm to your Magento site.

Limit Admin Access

To ensure nobody accesses your Admin panel from anywhere else, you should simply limit your store Admin access on your IP Address. This IP restriction leaves a lot of hackers scratching their head when they try to access your Magento 2 store, thereby enhancing the security.

SSL Certificate

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) secures a website by establishing an encrypted link between a web server and the browser. All the data that passes through this link remains private. SSL is especially important for all websites that deal in online transactions. Hence, adding HTTPs to your Magneto 2 store helps protect the private information of your users, such as login credentials, credit card information, and other sensitive data. To add this layer of security, you have to purchase the SSL Certificate and further configure it on your Magento 2 store so as to force the store pages to load on HTTPS.

Enable Captcha

Enabling CAPTCHA prevents hackers, attackers and even bots from your Magento 2 store. You must enable this brilliant feature offered by Magento 2 for a safer and secure user experience.

Configure Action Log

If you’re using Magento 2 Enterprise Edition, one of its great features that you can take advantage from is the configuration of Action Log. This feature helps you to track administrator activity and view all the log history. Not only that, you can also check the source of all the activities on your Admin panel and even view the IP of that resource.

In case you are using Magento’s Community Edition, you have to install a third party extension to add this feature.

Regular Scheduled Security Scan

Regular and scheduled security scan can safeguard your website from latest vulnerabilities and security loopholes. Magento has rolled out a new security scan tool that enables you to regularly monitor your Magento site and receive updates regarding known security risks, malware, and unauthorized access. Security Scan is a free service offered by Magento and can be run on any of its versions, be it Magento Commerce (formerly Enterprise Edition) or Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition).

For further details, you can refer to:

https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/introducing-new-magento-security-scan-tool.

And that’s it. Please feel free to comment or reach out if you have any questions. If you want to optimize your Magento store security, please get in touchwith us.