Over the years Magento has brought out a steady stream of security patches for their Magento 1 system. These are small updates to the code to fix security vulnerabilities and ways for hackers or other malicious entities to exploit your website. They have included vulnerabilities like preventing customers credit card details to be stolen, administer the website remotely and steal sensitive data.
With Magento ending support for their Magento 1 system on June 2020, vital security updates will not be developed anymore, leaving Magento 1 stores vulnerable to attacks.
How will this affect me?
If you are running Magento 1 after its end of life, your website will become less secure over time. While it might take hackers some time to find exploits, when they do, there will be no easy way of preventing your website from falling victim to them.
With 65 percent of cyber-attacks being aimed at small and medium-sized businesses and Magento being one of the biggest platforms for e-commerce, it’s certain that Magento 1 will be a system that will be widely targeted by hackers after support is finished.
Consequences of a breach
When a security breach does happen, it tends to be a lengthy and complicated process to resolve and does not always guarantee a complete fix. Hacks can cause hours of downtime to your website affecting your sales, your SEO ranking as well as the trust of your customers and your reputation.
In the case of credit card details being stolen, you might even be looking at hefty fines from your payment gateway and/or lawsuits from your customers (look at the graph below). Even after everything has been solved, due to no security patches coming out from Magento, the initial exploit used might still be present, leaving you open for another attack.
Graph via SecurityIntelligence
What you can do
Magento will fully put their focus on Magento 2, their new flagship platform that’s been around for a couple of years now. If you are still running Magento 1, now would be the right time to consider migrating to a new platform.
Besides security, there’s a lot of benefits in moving to Magento 2 and now might be the time to not just looking into changing platforms, but look into improving your website as a whole.
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