In the ecommerce industry, the biggest challenge for every online store owner is keeping their store secure. Visitors trust websites with good security rather than the poor one. Therefore, improving your online store security is the top most priority for a store owner. If you have set up your store on Magento 2, few tips could help you in improving your Magento 2 store security.
 
From past experiences, we know that Magento Commerce stores are vulnerable to security issues. However, with only a few tweaks and care, these issues can be taken dealt with ease. In this article, I am going to share some valuable tips to prevent your Magento 2 store from threats. These tips will surely help you in security as well as performance.

1. Secure Magento 2 Environment

There are various things you can do to protect and secure the environment of your Magento 2 store, some of them are:

• Keeping your Magento 2 store up-to-date with the latest security patches applied
• Always install an extension/module from reliable source.
• Remove all the other unnecessary software/application running on your hosting server. (You have to contact your hosting provider to get this done)
• Only use secure connection protocol as SSH, SFTP or HTTPS to manage files and folders.
• Use unique and strong passwords. If you can, change them periodically.
• Carefully monitor issues and bugs that have reported to Magento Commerce by other store owners and developers. Check and fix them to avoid any security leaks.
• Limit the access to your Magento 2 Admin Panel. It is good practice to whitelist the IP address of each computer that you may use for the Admin Panel.
• The most important thing: Do not install any extension directly on a production server.
• Monitor traffic. Use Web Application Firewall to discover suspicious points.
• Your computer, the one used to access the Magento 2 Admin Panel, should be secure with a reliable antivirus.

You can protect the environment of Magento 2 if you focus on all the above points. The bonus point is, if your Magento 2 environment is clean, your store will also improve on performance.

2. Enhance Magento 2 Security

Setting up the security related configurations like settings, passwords, and ongoing maintenance will automatically help you to enhance the Magento 2 security abilities. The latest version of Magento 2 includes all the security patches recommended by Magento Commerce, so actually you do not need to think about the secured installation. However, still you can do some other below things:

• Use different, custom and unique URL for your Magento 2 Admin Panel instead of the default “admin”.
• Restrict access to any other staging, testing or development system.
• Always use and keep Correct File Permissions.
• Unique password for the Magento 2 Admin Panel is necessary. A mixture of letters, numbers and special characters makes the password stronger. Do not use your personal information, since it is easy to hack it via Social Engineering Methods.

3. Secured Hosting provider

You should select the most reliable, secure and fastest hosting provider for your Magento 2 store. Do your homework first, ask people in different forums, groups, discussions pages about their security before you choose them as your hosting provider. Make sure your hosting provider owns a secure software development lifecycle according to the industry standards. It is most important and beneficial for every store owner. Highly secure hosting providers make websites more trustable.
 
Hosting can be the deciding factor and major component of important business decisions. If you go with a hosting provider that does not provide support for Magento 2, then there may be cases when you need to fix issues with your server and website yourself.
 
If you go with a hosting provider that provides a managed Magento hosting service, e.g. Cloudways, then you will receive better support, and you will not have to invest time to manage your servers.
 
One more thing to focus on, you should always run your Magento 2 store on HTTPS rather than HTTP. It not only makes your store safer but also increases your store rank in Google.

4. Store Monitoring

Always monitor for signs of threats and attacks, periodically. It is one the most important things to follow up. You need to patch your store immediately after a major security patch release. Some other activities you can do on to monitor your server:

•  Regularly check the Action Log for any unusual activities.
• With the help of your hosting provider also, review your server logs for suspicious activities.
• You can also ask for help by automated log review tools like "Apache Scalp" & data integration tools like "TripWire" to receive notifications about any malware.
• Look up all system logins and sessions.
• Test your backups regularly to make sure that they can be restored.

5. Prepare A Recovery Plan

You need to prepare yourself in case if something suddenly happens to your Magento 2 store. You can include these following points to your recovery plan:

• Block access to your store or turn on Maintenance Mode, so the hacker will not be able to steal more data and information.
• Perform full backup,  which also includes the penetrated malware and hacked files.
• Determine the scope of the attack. Whether your store was defaced or it acts as a bot (sending spam emails to clients and others), whether your server was attacked directly or it was an attack on data which includes "Silent Card Capture" (send out customer's credit card data).
• Find the medium that was used to attack the store.
• Apply the latest security patch as soon as possible and reset all passwords, including the Server Credentials (Login and Database Passwords), Magento 2 Admin Panel Credentials, File Access, Payment Methods, Shipping Integrations and Web Services.
• It is very important to inform your customers about the attack, and this is the last thing you have to do. Warn them about all the problem and situations that can happen to their information and advice them to take a sudden action. To gain your trust, promise them to solve and compensate all the damage for them.
• After implementation of the necessary things and when problem solved, reinstall everything to make your Magento 2 store live on your hosting server.
   

That is all.

These are a few tips that will help you to improve your Magento 2 store security. If you face such a problem, the best thing to do is to stay calm and follow this article step by step. Ask for help from your hosting provider and your Magento 2 Developer. It is better to be always prepared from very first day rather than fix it when the problem occurs.