Vocabulary practice: Company Security

Read the text again and answer the questions with some of the words in bold.

You think your e-Commerce website is secure because you have a firewall and regularly use antivirus software? Think again! With more and more shoppers sharing their cardholder information, stealing that data is a lucrative business for hackers and identity thieves. They go to great lengths to obtain the sensitive information of your merchants and shoppers. This means you have to go to even greater lengths to prevent data breaches.

Sometimes you don’t know that your website was compromised until it is too late. Do your due diligence and conduct regular threat assessments. A penetration test helps replicate how a hacker could attack your website. Such a simulation exposes any configuration oversights or vulnerabilities of your system and helps you fix them before they become a liability.

What else can you do to improve data security?

First of all, implement a company-wide security policy and make sure that both merchants and your employees adhere to it.

Secondly, ensure merchants comply with the PCI DSS guidelines which safeguard secure online transactions.

In addition, enforce strong password creation. Provide tips on how to create a strong password during signup. Disallow weak passwords such as”12345” or “password” and automatically block an account after 3 invalid attempts to log in. This should apply to merchants, customers, and website administrators.

Last but not least, use two-factor authentication (2FA). Apart from a username and password ask for additional credentials (security question, phone number) to verify a given user’s identity.