Preparing for the 2019 Festive Season: Securing your website for Black Friday

Our blog series all about making preparations for Black Friday continues. Black Friday falls on Friday 29^th November 2019 this year, with many retailers extending their offers in to cyber Monday and beyond. So far, we’ve covered the topics of strategy preparations, site and server preparations, and the importance of optimising your site for mobile.

Today’s blog is all about the security precautions you should be taking in a busy period like Black Friday.

Black Friday can be a dangerous time for consumers and businesses alike when the proper security measures aren’t in place. This is a two way street, you need to exhaust all options to ensure you’re keeping customer data as safe as possible, but also customers should be doing all they can to protect their own details. This can be a challenge, as the rush to bag the latest bargains can cause people to lower their guard.

In terms of securing your own site and server, one of the simplest things you can do is to install an SSL certificate. It’s actually critical that you have an SSL certificate installed at any time. An Extended Validation (EV) certificate in particular will provide the next level of protection by way of its strict issuance and governance process. It can be a lengthy process to become validated, so if you don’t already have one we suggest you start the process now, but no other certificate can compare to instill confidence in your customers and gain their trust regarding your company’s legitimacy. If you are shopping yourself, always make sure you’re checking the address bar to ensure that the site you are entering your card details in to is protected by a valid SSL certificate.

You can also increase your site speed and security by using Cloudflare. CWCS works in partnership with Cloudflare, utilising their WAF protection which is included on the Pro and Business plan, will protect your business from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests.

Cloudflare is quick and easy to set up and offer a broad range of site protection, including DDoS, hacking and spam. Cloudflare security systems are adapted based on traffic pattern analysis of millions of visitors in real time, ensuring only the good traffic gets through.

What is both unique and powerful about Cloudflare is that their system gets smarter the more sites that become part of the Cloudflare community.

The speed of your site will increase using Cloudflare’s CDN and additional features such as Railgun™.

CWCS are able to offer fully managed support for both Pro, and Business Cloudflare Plans. Download our Datasheet for further information.

Make sure you’ve protected your server and website with an anti-virus solution. Our preferred solution is Bitdefender®, a next-gen protection tool that fights off attacks from aggressive ransomware families. Their global network protects over 500 million machines and is the largest security infrastructure in the world, performing 11 billion security queries per day, neutralising dangers anywhere in the world in as little as 3 seconds.

It is essential that you have a backup solution in place, and depending on the revenue you expect the site to generate will determine the backup strategy you should implement. CWCS offers a wide range of backup solutions to suit all requirements and budgets.

If you require further information regarding any of the above details, please contact us today on 0800 1 777 000, or by using our online Contact Form.