Five Things Every CMO Needs To Know About Magecart

If you are a retail marketing leader, you might not know that much about Magecart, but you should, as it can be a significant threat to your brand. It’s caused real damage to some of the biggest brands in the world, including Macy’s and British Airways. And I’ve seen predictions that Magecart will impact more brands in 2020 than in any year previous.

Working as the chief marketing officer (CMO) of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that helps e-commerce companies protect their websites and web apps, I understand the need for CMOs to protect their brand’s reputation and the importance of learning about this threat.

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What is Magecart?

Magecart is the name given to attacks done by a loose collection of malicious hacker groups that target e-commerce systems to steal customer information and financial data. The name originates from attacks against the Magento e-commerce platform. Magecart has since become a description of a common attack method: inserting malicious code into an e-commerce website’s code base to skim data from site visitors. The Magecart code captures sensitive customer information from online payment forms, including email addresses, passwords and credit card numbers.

The Magecart code can even inject fields that were not there originally. For example, an attack against a retail website might add a loyalty account field to capture even more user information. Visitors are not warned about these changes and there is virtually no way to know the site they are visiting has been compromised. You, the website owner, often don’t know your site code has been attacked and changed until it’s too late.

There are five ways CMOs can be impacted.

While security teams have the primary role to address Magecart, CMOs have different concerns. Here are five things that every marketing leader should know about Magecart and what they (Read more...)