Hacker Attacks: How to Protect Your eCommerce Store

Nevertheless, there are skilled programmers who try to hack Magento ® online stores and, unfortunately, they succeed.

One of the first steps to protect your business is changing the admin panel login URL. The most widely-spread URLs are those like http://domain.com/admin or http://domain.com/administrator. That is why the stores with such URLs are hacked most frequently.

So, it is recommended to make the admin panel URL as unique as possible. Let us review how to make this happen. This does not require any additional extensions for Magento ®.

In order to modify the admin panel URL, you need to open the file app/etc/local.xml using any text or code editor. Locate the following code in that file:

<admin>
    <routers>
        <adminhtml>
            <args>
                <frontname><!--[CDATA[admin]]></frontName-->
            </frontname></args>
        </adminhtml>
    </routers>
</admin>

Now you need to replace <![CDATA[admin]]> with <![CDATA[new_admin_url]]>. Let it be <![CDATA[manager]]>, for example. After you save the settings, your admin panel URL will change to http://domain.com/manager.

In order to make sure that all changes are applied it is necessary to clean the cache. This is done with the help of deleting all folders in var/cache folder. Once all actions are complete you can access your admin panel using the new URL.

Please feel free to contact us directly in case you have any questions. If you know other ways to protect your online store please share them in the comments to this article.