WooCommerce is the most popular shopping cart plugin for WordPress powered websites and is used to sell everything from physical products, digital downloads, memberships, subscriptions, and much more.

Out of the box WooCommerce has five preinstalled payment gateways including PayPal, but with the additional Free Stripe Payments extension, you can accept credit card payments and now Apple Pay.

When a user visits your Apple Pay enabled store from their compatible device, they simply click the Buy with Apple Pay button and are then prompted to Pay with Touch ID. The system will automatically send the required shipping and billing information and process the payment, making the entire buying process much faster and easier. If the user’s device is not Apple Pay compatible, the Buy with Apple Pay button will not be displayed.

What about security?

We are firm believers that you should NOT store credit card and other sensitive information on your web server. PCI compliance is very difficult to maintain and the liability is great should the server ever become compromised. This is where a payment gateway like Stripe really shines. All of the sensitive data is passed securely through your website via HTTPS to the Stripe servers for processing and is never stored on your web server.

As Apple Pay and other tap and pay methods are gaining in popularity with tech users, there is still a perception of security risk with general consumers. Security and privacy is at the core of Apple Pay. When a credit or debit card is added to Apple Pay, the card numbers are not stored on the device or on the Apple servers, but instead a unique device-specific number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored on the user’s device. Then each transaction is authorized with a one-time dynamic security code.

Stripe’s Apple Pay feature is currently only available in 10 countries including Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States. If your country is not listed, sign up to be notified when it becomes available over on the Stripe Apple Pay website page.

Trevor Current

Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.

currentphotographer.com

SUCURI, a leading WordPress security company, announced their finding of an SQL injection vulnerability in the popular NextGEN Gallery plugin.

This vulnerability can be exploited by attackers in at least two different scenarios:

1. If you use a NextGEN Basic TagCloud Gallery on your site.

2. If you allow your users to submit posts to be reviewed (contributors).

If you fit into any of these two cases, you’re definitely at risk.

This issue existed because NextGEN Gallery allowed improperly sanitized user input in a WordPress prepared SQL query; which is basically the same as adding user input inside a raw SQL query. Using this attack vector, an attacker could leak hashed passwords and WordPress secret keys in certain configurations.

SUCURI advises updating to the latest version of the NextGEN Gallery plugin now.

You can read more about the SQL injection vulnerability on the SUCURI Blog.

At Current Photographer we take security very seriously. With our Managed WordPress Hosting, we make sure that our client’s websites are backed up daily, and protected with multiple firewalls throughout our enterprise-grade infrastructure. Our real-time security threat detection, and security audits and code reviews help to keep client’s sites safe. Should a website become compromised, we will immediately take action to find the exploit, remove the malicious code, and have the site back up and running in no time.

Trevor Current

Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.

currentphotographer.com

The WooCommerce team just announced version 2.6.4 of their plugin is available for download from WordPress.org or as an automatic update in the WP Admin.

This release squashes some bugs and addresses a few security issues, so if you’re using WooCommerce, be sure to backup your website files and database before running the update. You can learn more about the release here.

If you’re not familiar with WooCommerce, it’s probably the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress used today and has over 1 million installs. The base plugin is incredibly powerful out of the gate and gives you a ton of features to sell your products and services. Because of its extensibility and dedicated community of developers, there are a huge number of free and paid add-ons that you can install for even more features and functionality.  Read More→

Trevor Current

Founder of Current Photographer, co-host of The Digital Photography Cafe Show, Designer, Photographer, and overall tech geek.

currentphotographer.com