Updates for eCommerce systems are common in fact sometimes it seems like they are never ending and for good reason, every day new security vulnerabilities are identified that could cause your website to shut down if the latest code isn’t included in your website to protect you and your customers data.
Yesterday such an updates was released for Magento 2 taking the current version number up to 2.2.6 all stores should now be updated to the latest version as a matter of urgency (or hopefully so you are told by your developers and agencies)
However why is this update so important?
This release includes 25 critical security enhancements and 150 code fixes including but nor limited to the below…
Thumbnail and image scaling time has been reduced by 90%, this means first time someone visits a new product page the time it takes to generate the thumbnails is 1 tenth what it was previously.
Indexing is now 80% faster, this is a process that magento goes through to pull complex data from the database which takes time to load and stores it in an index, this index is faster to access when people view the front end of your website, speeding up the indexing operation means that your website is less likely to lock or slow down reducing this time can improve customer experience when visiting your store when indexing is ongoing.
A bug where if the shopping cart page is constantly refreshed caused magento to empty the cart has now been fixed.
A bug where if a customer refreshed the checkout page the shipping address disappears has now been fixed.
Mass deletion bug suffered by organisations with unstable internet connections has now been resolved.
If you are on an older version of Magento 2 our advice is get upgraded ASAP.
This can involve some downtime but compared to a PCI compliance investigation it is negligible but more importantly essential for keeping your store secure and free of existing bugs.
Any one that says these updates are insignificant is probably in the wrong job as hackers are discovering new exploits every day for large scale platforms such as Magento, keeping up to date helps you ensure the methods they are employing will be blocked by your store.
The good news is that none of the 25 security issues in this release appear to have been exploited in the wild YET however you can bet your last penny that hackers will be looking at the changes to the code to identify how to hack older versions of Magento so get your site upgraded ASAP.
At AME WebTech we offer support agreements that include these updates, generally speaking they can cause your store to be down for approx. 30 minutes but lets be honest here your customers are entrusting you to keep their data as secure as possible and you have a duty of care to ensure that this expectation is being met at every turn.
