Keeping your eCommerce site secure is critical to your business success. Our Magento Patch Installation Service helps you achieve that goal. Its available on either an hourly basis, or as part of our Magento Managed Hosting plans.
Why Should I Patch My Site?
There are two primary reasons. Patching your site fixes security problems, first of all. Hackers are continuously looking for weaknesses in websites. Ecommerce platforms like Magento contain millions of lines of code. They are very complex so it is impossible for programmers to create perfect code. Hackers also frequently publicize the vulnerability to other hackers. The hackers frequently write scripts to find websites with the unpatched vulnerability. In addition, they’ll scan millions of sites looking for websites that don’t have the code patched.
Learn more about ransomware.
Once a hacker finds an unpatched site, lots of bad things can happen. Most commonly, they’ll penetrate the site to steal passwords, credit card numbers, your company data and/or to use your site to attack other sites. Or, the hacker installs ransomware. Hackers threaten to encrypt your site and shut it down and demand a payment. Or, they’ll go ahead and encrypt it and demand the ransom. Either way, you’ll lose business because customers will lose confidence in your business. Some will therefore go elsewhere.
The second reason to keep your website patched is to comply with security standards and vendor agreements. Most commonly, merchants will have signed an agreement with a credit card merchant service provider (MSP). In addition, all MSPs require that software that handles or stores credit card data be PCI compliant. PCI compliance includes keeping your software patched and up to date. MSPs scan ecommerce sites for vulnerabilities. If your site fails the scan, you’ll be contacted and required to perform the updates anyway. As a result, you may even be fined.
How Do I get the Magento Patch Installation Service?
Two ways. First, if you host with Web 2 Market, we apply the patches automatically. Our Magento Managed Hosting plans include the service at no extra charge. Second, you can call us. If your site is already hacked, we can do a quick evaluation and give you an idea what it will take to kick the hackers out. Finally, most security patch installs take couple hours.
In conclusion, be proactive about dealing with security issues. What seems like an once of prevention is less painful than a pound of cure.