What are the Best Magento Security Tips to Protect your Online Store?

eCommerce is growing dramatically and looking at the growth of eCommerce worldwide, running an eCommerce website is challenging because today all the websites face serious risks. And if you have an eCommerce website, then you have to ensure to secure your website from threats and cyber-attacks.

Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms that makes it a desirable target for hackers and attackers. As per Astra Security Report, 62% of Magento stores have at least one vulnerability. Ordinarily, attacker cracks e-commerce websites to steal information that they can utilize to their advantage, to utilize it for electronic spam; to harm your website, to use it for phishing (the attempt to receive customer’s private information such as credit cards details or passwords). So Magento store security is one of the most important things for now to secure the personal information and private (financial) data of your customers.

Attacks can lead to compromised customer information, disrupted operations, and leaked financial data. When this happens, the reputation and credibility of your brand can take a serious dive, and no company can afford that. It’s important for Magento store users to learn how to increase Magento security and take primitive actionable measures to defend against malicious intent and keep the website protected. However, you can reduce these risks systematically and strengthen your Magento website by following a set of Magento security tips.

In this comprehensive guide, we have listed Best Magento security tips to protect your website data from attackers.

Best Magento Security Checklist to Protect and Safeguard your Magento Store

This Magento Security checklist recommended by experts will ensure that you don’t miss any of the significant parts of your website integration and also make sure that they are configured properly with the highest level of security.

• Remove FTP and start using SFTP
• Install SSL certificate
• Do not save passwords
• Lockdown cronjobs
• Keep your system updated
• Ensure physical system security
• Backup important files
• Make sure you use strong passwords including special characters, numbers, uppercase, lowercase.
• Delete unnecessary packages
• Regularly update Magento versions
• Disable directory indexing
• Use two-factor authentication
• Acquire encrypted connection
• Eliminate email loopholes
• Get a Magento security review done from experts
• Have a solid backup system
• Magento security audit
• Change the default admin URL.

Also Read: BEST SECURITY PRACTICES AND OVERVIEW OF MAGENTO 2

Top 8 Essential Magento Security Tips

Do you want to know the top 8 essential Magento security tips to protect your online store? Here we are sharing the important Magento store security tips.

1. Use reCAPTCHA

Protecting your website from fraud, abuse, and attackers, Magento 2 reCAPTCHA is the best option. It is a foolproof way of blocking spam and keeping your Magento website safe from attackers. It is used to ensure genuine and secure site logins by determining if the access session that is being initiated on your website is done by a human or a bot. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” to read or solve, and difficult for other malicious software to figure out.

Most of the website owners use reCAPTCHA to defend their website against attacks and to ensure the search engine spiders can only crawl the web pages which are essential. This will help to avoid spam content that can put the database or sensitive data at risk of exploitation by malicious perpetrators.

2. Update Magento Latest Version

Upgrade Magento 2 to latest version and keeping it up to date is very important because every new version comes up with specific features to ensure security and high performance. It’s obvious for some to update to the latest version of Magento, but for many store owners it’s not that easy, and they find it hard to follow. No need to worry about that because Magento developers can help you with this. They not only identify and fix known security issues, but also introduce new security features to make the platform more safe and robust. Magento (Adobe Commerce) has released the latest version Magento 2.4.6 on March 14, 2023.

Every new update from Magento has typically included fixes for previous Magento security patches problems. In the end, keeping your website up to date is crucial. You can test Magento once a stable version has been released. For all Magento releases, Adobe has started releasing security-only patches in Magento version 2.3.3. With the help of these security-only patches, store owners will receive security fixes regularly without having to completely upgrade their store until they’re ready.

Also Read:- How To Check Your Magento Version

3. Implement Two-Factor Authentication

Let’s talk about another best Magento security tip, it is none another than Two-Factor Authentication. Make sure that your eCommerce store is implemented, as it provides an extra layer of protection to make it impossible for attackers and hackers to attack your Magento store. This security option comes with different two-factor authentication methods like Google authenticator, author, Duo security, and much more. One can boost the security of the Magento admin username using the built-in Magento Two-Factor Authentication extension, where they just need to use a password and a security code from their devices.

4. Get an Encrypted Connection (SSL/HTTPS)

Do you know that one of the biggest reasons for security breaches is an unencrypted connection or unauthorized connection? But you can avoid these breaches easily by using a secure Magento connection. If you are using Magento, then getting HTTPS/SSL is not rocket science.

Follow the below points:

• To get a secure HTTPS/SSL URL in Magento, search the tab “Use Safe URLs” in the device setup menu.
• Try the Let's Encrypt section, to get the SSL certificate. Having an SSL certificate is one of the key aspects of ensuring that your website is PCI-compliant, and your online purchases are secure.

5. Backup Your Site Regularly

We all know that backup prevents data loss, so if you don’t back up your Magento website, then start doing it now regularly. In case, if something got missing, then you can use your backup and recover all the crucial data automatically. There will be no data loss. Make sure that you do not hold the backup copies on the same device as your website because if an attacker gained access to your server then it might be possible that he can access your backup which can be problematic and also if your server crashes, then it might harm your backup copies too.

Use built-in backup functionalities or other recommended technologies and binary tools for website backup. You can also configure the cron jobs on your server to back up the file system or the database at specific times. For additional security purposes, you can even upload them to remote servers. Remote backups are a great way to ensure that if things go wrong, you always have a working version of the website to fall back on.

6. Use a Unique URL for Admin Dashboard

It’s very important to set a custom path for your admin panel because hackers can easily access my-site.com/admin, which is a regular admin panel for every website. You can change this by using a custom word at the place of /admin. The custom word you use can be anything based on your website requirement. So even if hackers get their hands on your password, this custom word helps to stop hackers from accessing the admin login page of your Magento store. If you are using Magento 1, then you can change the Magento admin URL by editing the local.xml file. While in Magento 2, you can edit the env.php file to make the changes. One of the best solution for generating good traffic for your online store is Magento 2 URL Rewrite programmatically. The rewriting the URL function allows you to create 301 redirects in Magento 2.

7. Use Secure and Strong Passwords

Always remember that never ever set a simple password for your million-dollar store which can be accessed easily. There are people who always forget a password easily and in that case, they try to use an easy password that can be remembered easily. But believe us, it is not the smartest move for your business. Always try to use a complex password which is a combination of numbers, lower case, upper case, symbols, etc.

8. Utilize Firewall to Stop MySQL Injection

For an additional layer of security to a website, you can use a web application firewall (WAF). It analyses, monitors, and filters the web traffic for suspicious patterns and stops the malicious traffic before it reaches your server.

To block any newly discovered threats, you can update the WAFs in real-time. Also, adding a WAF to your Magento website can protect it from more complex SQL injection attacks and a сross-site scripting attack. No doubt that Magento helps to prevent MySQL injection but for better security of your website, you can implement a firewall application to defend your websites against such security breaches and attacks.

Final Takeaway

Tada! Above, we have listed discussed the essential Magento security tips to protect your Magento store from attackers. We understand that the process of a data breach is troubling, and nobody in the world will guarantee you the 100% security of your Magento store. If you don’t even budge to follow the normal security protocols, nobody going to tell you that your store won’t get caught in any cyberattack. So it’s mandatory to make Magento store security your foremost priority.

And we know that prevention is always better than cure, and there is no doubt that effective protection needs advanced solutions. So keep your Magento store updated and enhance the security of your website immediately.

Nevertheless, an ambitious business needs outstanding high performing, and the best Magento hosting that ensures your advanced security needs with highly effective and reliable protection solutions. In case you require any kind of assistance, you can always reach out to MageAnts. We'd be glad to perform an initial review of your website to evaluate the protection standard, identify any loopholes and help you to fix them.

FAQs: Magento security

What is Magento security?

Magento is one of the stable, most popular, and secure ecommerce platforms that provide the best built-in security features. These available security features assist in reducing security hazards such as information theft, data leaks, unlawful transactions, and other malware patches or attacks. Make sure you have applied all the possible solutions for Magento security like extensions, trusted themes, and hosting.

How do I keep Magento Secure?

Try to implement the best practices recommended by the experts. Use the Magento mentioned pro-tips and Magento security checklist to keep your Magento store safe and secure from any kind of uncertainty or attacks. Migrate to Magento 2, back up your data regularly, use strong passwords, update to the latest Magento version, ensure two-factor authentication, use a web application firewall or WAF.

Can Magento be hacked?

Even if you think that Magento is a very secure platform as it has some of the best security features available, but there is no harm in taking extra precautions to ensure more Magento security. There’s very little probability for the Magento website to get hacked. But if other parts do not properly get secure for the Magento application, then it is still that a Magento website can get hacked or compromised.

Which is the best security plugin for Magento?

A few of the best security extensions are Astra, Magento 2 Spam and Bot Blocker by MageAnts, Two-Factor Authentication by Amasty, Magefence, etc. You must have these security plugins for your website to make your customer and website data more secure.

How do I run a Magento security scan?

To run a security scan on your Magento store, you need to set up Magento Security Scan Tool first. Then log in to your Magento account and agree to the Terms & Conditions. Later on, add your website on the Monitored Websites page and verify your site domain’s ownership via a confirmation code. Once it's done, schedule your security scan to happen on the basis of week and day. Finally, set up your email address to get notifications of the scan reports and security updates.

What is the Magento security scan tool?

Magento Security Scan tool is a new security tool rolled out by Magento that enables Magento store owners to regularly monitor their sites for security risks and receive updates regarding malware patches, and also detect unauthorized access.