{"id":810,"date":"2020-02-05T06:01:39","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T06:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/05\/protecting-magento-storefronts\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T17:07:51","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T11:37:51","slug":"protecting-magento-storefronts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/protecting-magento-storefronts\/","title":{"rendered":"A Merchant&#8217;s Guide To Protecting Magento StoreFronts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>&#8220;There&#8217;s no such thing as unhackable&#8221; &#8211; says Sahil Chug, <a href=\"https:\/\/webscoot.io\/managed-magento-hosting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">MageHost<\/a> CEO at <a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/meet-magento-india-2020-recap\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">#MM20IN<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This post, inspired by the informative session by <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sahil_chugh_\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Sahil Chug<\/a> at Meet Magento India 2020, is a merchant&#8217;s guide to <strong>protecting Magento storefronts<\/strong> which can also be referred by anyone responsible for Magento store security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why is Magento Store Security Important?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When the store customers witness data breaches, and that too in high-profile online brands, their trust in E-commerce is lost. Even if the online stores effectively resolves the issue in no time, it doesn&#8217;t matter to the customers because they believe that the store didn&#8217;t implement enough security system in the first place!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once the confidence and trust are lost in the business, the merchant faces serious repercussions which are much more than the monetary loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Additionally, there is a constant possibility of a blacklist warning from Google and other search engines. Apart from harming the SEO results, your host can also suspend your store with a suspect of malicious activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Therefore, it is quite difficult for the store owners to recover from a security breach than to prevent it. It is even harder for small online businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How is Magento Store Security Compromised?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Check the below reasons and see if any one of them is applicable to your Magento or Magento 2 store:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Magento security patches not applied<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Bad extensions<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Web server exploits<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>PHP exploits<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>SQL exploits<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Insecure URLs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you suspect a breach, you can confirm it by comparing&nbsp;the code in git or in local files with the live files, and the additional code in the live files would be the data hack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Common Magento Malware Endangering Store Security:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Magecart<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Cloud Harvester<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Shoplift Malware<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Magento Killer<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>GuruInc Malware<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Visbot Malware<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>MagentoCore<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Steps to Protecting Magento StoreFronts From Hacks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If your store is vulnerable to a security breach, here are some of the actions you can implement to offer a secure online shopping destination for your customers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/magento-security-patches-installation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Install Magento security patches<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Avoid using bad extensions that are developed without following Magento coding standards.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Fix responsibility<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Choose the <a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/magento-hosting-providers\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Magento hosting partner<\/a> who has technical knowledge about Magento and can be helpful when a breach happens.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Block Magento related sensitive URLs<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Harden PHP &amp; webserver<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/change-admin-url-in-magento-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Set custom Magento admin URL<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Brute force protection for admin URL and IP restrictions, i.e, provide the&nbsp;admin URL access to the specific IP users only.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/install-magento-2-two-factor-authentication\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Enable 2FA<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The media folder has 777 permission by default. So it is advisable not to add PHP code files in media folders and&nbsp;scan media folders for the files with PHP code<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Block Magescan, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.magereport.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Magereport.<\/a> Sahil recommends blocking them because these sites get information about breaches while scanning, which can be used to hack the data.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Practice configuring strong passwords and<a href=\"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/reset-magento-2-admin-password\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"> keep changing<\/a> them regularly.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>No keys in codes, only in setting files<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Don&#8217;t put test files in live server<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>DB backup files &#8211; Don&#8217;t put the database back up files in live server<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Don&#8217;t have an attitude of giving 777 file permissions in the case when something goes wrong.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ensure backups and DR plan. Make sure that the backups should be useful when things break down.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Get <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Security_Standard\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">PCI compliant<\/a>. Check <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcisecuritystandards.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.pcisecuritystandards.org\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can keep this as a checklist and implement each of them to ensure 100% store security!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Risking security of the Magento store is risking the business. Investing time and money in precautions and security of the store is only a wise thing to do!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is very important that each reader shares the post with Magento store owners via their social media profiles and contributes to making the internet a better place for shopping!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s no such thing as unhackable&#8221; &#8211; says Sahil Chug, MageHost CEO at #MM20IN This post, inspired by the informative session by Sahil Chug at&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magento"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20742,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810\/revisions\/20742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meetanshi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}