Your Guide to a Secure Payment Gateway

With the huge involvement of internet in our day to day life, it has become the preferred environment for different e-services like e-commerce, e-banking, e-voting, e-government, etc.  When most of the companies are moving into e-businesses, use of payment gateways to do online payments is needed. A payment gateway is a service that authenticates payments for e-businesses and online retailers. 

Features of a Secure Payment Gateway

Since there is an enormous flow of digital money and secured data, the most critical factor for an online transaction is to provide trust to the customer that the transaction is secure and reliable in all aspect. A secure payment involves several mechanisms like encryption, protocols, firewalls and certification to keep the customer and merchant data safe.

Making sure your payment gateway is secure is your top priority. At a minimum, it should be integrated with 3D Secure and comply with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Level 1 compliance indicates they’ve achieved the highest level of security possible and process over 6 million Visa transactions every year. Other security features, such as address verification, duplication checks, CVV2, CVC2 and CSC security codes, should come as standard, helping merchants to protect their business and their customers too.

There are few security best practices which one can follow to check if the page is secure:

• Right-click anywhere on the payment page, selecting “properties” and choosing “details.” The details will list the encryption/security, and you’re looking to see if “SSL” is listed as the security type. 

• One another way to check if the page is secure is by seeing if the URL of your pay page starts with “HTTPS” or not. if so, that means you have a secure site! If you don’t have a secure site, you can purchase an SSL certificate from companies like Rapid SSL. 
  

• Cookies should be marked secure, which tells the browser to transmit the cookie only when the request is HTTPS. So, even if a user opens an HTTP page, which shouldn’t exist, their cookie is never transmitted in clear text to the server. If the secure parameter doesn’t exist, an attacker could eavesdrop on a user’s session when an HTTP page is opened. Having access to the merchant’s cookie, the attacker could steal user data, reset keys or even worse.
  

• E-Commerce websites do not ask or need sensitive info such as your Aadhar number for any business reasons. So watch out and never share unnecessary information. 
  

• Make it a habit to check your statements online for your credit card, debit card, and checking accounts to ensure no fraudulent charges exist.
  

• Always shop using trusted websites instead of browsing on search engines. Search engine results can be misleading.
  

• Avoid using public computers, which puts your information at high risk of being stolen.
  

There are so many payment gateways all over the world today. They use different security mechanisms to protect the transaction data.