It is very much critical to secure the Magento site since it would hold sensitive information related to the client’s payment details and also to make the customer feel safe when shopping. Magento does release security patches very often and it is the store owner’s responsibility to update as and when it's released. Let's look at some of the steps that you would need to secure you Magento 2 site as hard as a rock:
Upgrading to the latest version:
Magento 2 very often releases the latest updates and new versions are being launched containing various features like security enhancements, performance optimizations, new features, and updates. It is always recommended to update you Magento 2 site to the latest version because these release is being done in order to mitigate the security issues that are identified recently. All the security updates and version released are informed to the store owners whenever they log-in to the Magento 2 admin dashboard. It is recommended to update your store (either you can do it or have a Magento Expert handle the upgrade for you) as and when you see this from the Admin Dashboard.
Complicated Admin URL & Captcha:
Do you have your Magento admin URL something like the below one ?:
It just means that your site is susceptible for an easy Brute Force Attacks. Admin URLs are being easily guessed by hackers and would try to gain access to the backend using Brute Force Attacks on the Admin Login form. The default Magento 2 installation would itself create a complicated admin URL but if for any reasons, you have to change it to something simpler to remember like “admin”, “backend”, etc. please change it a random string that is hard to guess. Also, it is highly recommended that you enable Captcha for Magento 2 Admin panel login form so that you backed is safe and secured from Brute Force Attacks. Some store owners go one step further and enable captcha for the frontend of the website customer registration form also. This would prevent spam account creations.
2 Factor Authentication:
There are both free and paid extensions available for enabling two-factor authentications using the Google Authenticator. Apart from using complicated admin URLs and Captcha, integrating 2-factor authentication (2FA) could tighten up the admin panel making it nearly impossible to penetrate by unauthorized persons. It is worth using paid solutions for enabling 2FA for your Magento 2 admin panel. Go ahead with integrating one.
Strong Admin Password:
Another thing that is very much important is to use a very strong and a complicated admin password. This would make it difficult for brute force attacks. Also, do not store such sensitive information in any easy to access devices and do not write it down somewhere. An unauthorized access to the admin panel could have the impact on your business exposing sensitive information related to payments and catalog. Consider using special characters like ‘&, >, $, @, etc’, uppercase and lowercase, alphanumeric characters. There are many online password generator tools that you can use to create complex passwords in just a click. Do have the habit of changing your admin passwords periodically say once in 45 days or any frequency that you wish.
Backup Plans:
There are 2 backup plans that can be set up for your Magento website. One being the Magento backup and the other one is the backup process that runs on the server. You can create a Magento backup using the Admin Panel by navigating to System -> Tools -> Backup. You can also do a automatic scheduled backup at Stores -> Configuration -> Advanced -> System. While configuring scheduled backup, make sure you specify the off-peak hours of your website as your start time since there are chances that your site could go down or may become unresponsive during the backup process due to heavy utilization of server resource. Also, the scheduled Magento backup would work only if the cron is being set up for the Magento 2 properly. Keep in mind about the server’s storage space also. You can ask your hosting provider to set up backup for your Magento site. Usually, most of the hosting providers do this in a regular basis but have a word with them just to ensure that everything is in place and to know when will the backups be taken and how frequently would they happen.
HTTPS for your website:
Nowadays Google is listing websites that have SSL certificate on top of the search results compared to sites that do not have SSL installed on their server. Not only does this make your site secured and trusted for your end users, it also gives us the benefits of good search engine ranking. So let's not have any second thought on this. Just go ahead and install the SSL certificate in your server. You can contact your hosting provider and help would help you set it up for you.