In the e-commerce industry, securing your e-commerce store from hackers is an inevitable task. You can’t compromise the security of your store even for a minute. Among all the security threats for an e-commerce store, Brute Force Attacks are the most common ones. But if you have developed your e-commerce store on Magento, then you don’t have to take any worry. Thanks to the ultimate security measures of Magento which can help you in eliminating any brute Force attack. In Magento, security is the center of everything, and the Magento developers are highly focused to make sure that every Magento merchant is vigilant and up-to-date in protecting the store and their customers’ data 24x7x365. In this article, we are going to discuss the Brute Force attack and how you can protect your e-commerce website or store from that.
What Is A Brute Force Attack?
In the cybersecurity world, brute force attack involves repetitive attempts of breaking into the site by trying different password combinations. This is basically a trial-and-error method for getting information such as username & password. Most of the attackers use bots which they have installed in other computers to increase the computing power for doing such type of attacks. This repetitive action is like an army attacking a fort.
Now, probably you may think that it is quite easy and even you can break into the admin panel of an e-commerce site. Mostly the common ID i.e. admin has a password, and you have to just guess the password. If it is a 2-digit numeric PIN then there will be 100 possibilities (you can calculate it using a simple logic of Combination).
But no password in this world is protected by just a 2 digit PIN. Even the mobile lock PIN consists of 4 digits. And in the world of cybersecurity, the shortest length of the password is mostly 8 characters. After this, the complexity increases as alphabets can be also used for the password. Further, the alphabets can be used in both UPPERCASE and LOWERCASE, which increases the complexity of the password.
Suppose, you want to crack an 8-character password. Then let’s count the number of combinations. There are 26 English Alphabets, and since they are case-sensitive then it makes the characters 26 x 2 =52. After adding numeric digits it become 52 +10 = 62 i.e. we have total 62 characters.
For an 8 character password, there will be 628 combinations which make 2.1834011×1014 possible combinations.
If we try these attempts at the speed of 1 attempt per second then still it is going to take 218 trillion seconds or 3.6 trillion minutes or 7 million years. And obviously, no one is going to live that long.
How To Make It Happen Then?
If you want to crack the password then you have to use computers. For this, you have to write some programming codes which are quite basic. Now suppose you create a program that can try 1000 passwords in a second then still it is going to take 7 thousand years.
Still impossible.
You will require a supercomputer. Suppose you get a supercomputer that can try 1x 109 attempts per second. Now in just 22 seconds, all the 218 trillion attempts will be tested. But if the password is of 9 characters, then you have to wait a bit more.
Such computer resources are not available to common people. But the hackers are no ordinary people. They collect the computing resources by different means for e.g. by developing a powerful computing engine via software, etc.
Also, we did the above calculation for all the attempts of the 8th character password. But, what if your password is the 10th combination or the 100th combination? Hence, it is important to add multiple layers of security for detecting and deflecting any security breach.
What Is The Hacker’s Motive Behind This Act?
Behind every brute force attack, the aim of the hacker is to gain illegal access to a targeted ecommerce website and then utilize it in another kind of attack of stealing the data of customers or just shut it down. It is also possible that the hackers will add malicious code files for any long-term objectives without touching anything, or leaving any trace behind. Hence, it is better to do frequent scans of your Magento store files.
What You Can Do To Protect Your Magento store?
It is important that you must protect your Magento store from hackers. There are several ways to increase the security of your store. We have mentioned several approaches that you can discuss with your Magento developers team or Magento development company and implement them.
1.Create a Strong Password
The first thing that you must do against a brute-force attack is to use a strong password. You can find many tools for generating a strong password by just a Google search. Also, it is better if you change the password on a frequent basis given your existing password might end up on a common dictionary list used in brute-force attacks over time.
2.Use a custom admin path
It has been always recommended by Magento that the admin URL must not set as the default or other commonly used URLs such as “backend”. You can change the admin panel in your Magento store by this path.
Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > Custom Admin Path
3.Restrict admin access
Another step is to restrict the access of the Magento backend only to a few certain IPs. You can do this by protecting the admin path on a web server level.
4.Update Admin account security
As a merchant, you must configure the admin panel to limit the password reset requests to only 3. Also, set the maximum login failures to the lockout account. The lockout should be a minimum of 30 minutes. You can set these setting through this path:
Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > Security
5.Turn the Captcha ON
To eliminate the bots from entering the site, Captcha is being used. It is the code combinations of letters or images which is designed to verify the humans. You must protect the admin panel against brute force attacks by enabling Captcha. The path for this setting is:
Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > CAPTCHA
If you set the “Number of Unsuccessful Attempts to Login” to 0, the CAPTCHA verification will be required for admin login attempts. This is a very simple yet effective way to protect your magento store.
6.Activate Security Scanning
You must activate the Magento Security Scan Tool by which you can schedule the regular scans of all the domains. This free tool will allow you to monitor the sites in real-time security risks including admin panels that are vulnerable to force attacks. It also monitors for malware signatures.
7.Use 2-Factor Authentication
Magento has provided 2 Factor authentications while logging into your Magento.com. It is in My Account, Magento Forums, Magento Help Center, Magento Marketplace, Magento U, and the cloud admin. If you want to enable Magento.com two-factor authentication, then navigate onto the Two- Factor Authentication in the Account Settings. It is compatible with most authentication apps.
Wrapping Up
In this article, we have gone through different tactics and ways that can help in increasing security and protect your Magento store. It is best to hire a Magento development company for the ongoing maintenance of your Magento store. Hire an experienced Magento development company, which has expertise in developing and maintaining Magento stores.
