eCommerce sites especially, often become an unwitting target for hackers and fraudsters, be it people or automated systems. It’s not so much they getting into the system itself, but often flooding the cart with bogus sales using fraudulent or stolen credit card numbers. Here you will see a huge number of failed orders, with most payments rejected by your bank, some filtering through as payments that need to be refunded and the bank alerted.
In some cases, we’ve seen hundreds per hour flood the site. These usually come from stolen card numbers with automated system attempting to make a purchase. To eliminate these and other threats, there must be a wide range of measure taken to stop them.
The first of course is to run a general purpose plugin like wordfence, although this will only stop a few. Secondly, to add in a captcha tool into the purchasing workflow. Lastly, to have multiple scripts that identify these automated systems as well as tracking multiple sales from the same IP address or location, pushing them into a virtual black hole…
If you’ve problems in this area, we can help, getting your site up and running and fully protected, within 24 hrs.