Your Web site earned more than a million dollars last year. Business is booming and people are buying from you. You plan on expanding your product line, even expanding the services you offer. Then it happens. When you log into your Web site one morning, you see a page that announces to the whole world that your site was hacked [http://www.applicure.com/solutions/hacking-attacks]. The buyers stop buying, even your most loyal customers have taken their businesses elsewhere.

People are complaining that they are being redirected to another site, one which set their anti-virus software off. Before you know it, you have been sued by people who used to be your customers, alleging that your neglect has caused fraudulent transactions on their credit cards, or that the lax security on your site has led to identity thefts.

While this is an extreme scenario, it is a very possible one. And hacking attacks [http://www.applicure.com/solutions/hacking-attacks] are not the only headache you can encounter when you run an ecommerce Web site. You could easily fall prey to a denial of service attack or a virus infection. Either way, ignoring your systems' or Web site's security is a sure way to invite trouble.

The truth of the matter is that your Web site will have applications that are less than secure. Web applications accounted for 54% of all exploitable vulnerabilities discovered by IBM's unit, Internet Security System, in 2008. What is worse, it seems that Web application vendors are not inclined to do anything about it. The IBM unit also found that close to three-fourths of all known vulnerabilities found in Web applications have no available patches.

And the possibility of hackers targeting Web sites are high. In fact, hackers are more likely to try and hack into Web sites rather than robustly- and pro-actively protected networks, because security on Web sites is more lax.

Beef Up Your e-Commerce Security
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard recommends two things to make sure that an ecommerce Web site is adequately secure. One is to review all codes on your Web sites or applications. This can be a time consuming process and often involves the services of third-party security companies that may or may not do a good job at scanning your site, network and applications for vulnerabilities. What is more, you pay a separate fee for identifying these vulnerabilities, and another fee for actually fixing these errant codes.

The Easy Way
The other is to install and run a Web application firewall that can adequately inspect all incoming data packets to your Web site. A carefully configured Web application firewall can effectively and efficiently stave off a hacking attempt, a potential virus infection and other malicious attacks on your Web site.