Your online store makes money. But do you know who else has access to it?

Mar 4, 2026 — 5 minutes

Your online store makes money. But do you know who else has access to it?

Seven ways online stores in Spain are being attacked

Setting up an online store has never been easier. Shopify, WooCommerce, Prestashop. You pick a template, upload your products, connect the payment gateway… and start selling.

The platform takes care of security, right? Not exactly.

The platform protects the transaction. But everything surrounding that transaction — your plugins, your access credentials, your domain, your customers’ data — is your responsibility.

And that is exactly where attackers are getting in.

Here are seven real threats that are already affecting online stores in Spain and across Europe.

1. Someone has cloned your store and is selling under your brand

It is simpler than it sounds.

An attacker copies your entire website design (logo, product photos, copy, colors) and publishes it on a domain almost identical to yours.

Where you have yourstore.com, they register yourstore-shop.com or yourstore.es.

Then they buy ads on Google or social media using your brand name to attract your customers.

What you lose:

  • Direct revenue (customers buy from the fake store thinking it is yours)
  • Reputation (when they do not receive the product, the complaint goes against your brand)
  • Weeks of legal work to get the domain taken down

2. The plugin you installed with a 4.9-star rating is leaking your credentials

This is probably the least understood risk — and one of the most dangerous — in ecommerce today.

In January 2025, security researchers discovered that Consentik, a cookie consent plugin for Shopify, had been leaking sensitive merchant data for at least four months.

The exposed data included Shopify admin credentials and Facebook Ads tokens, stored on a publicly accessible server.

Consentik had the official “Made for Shopify” badge, a rating of 4.9 out of 5, and more than 4,000 stores were actively using it.

3. Your customers buy. Then they say it was not them

Chargeback fraud is one of the most immediate problems for any merchant.

It happens when a buyer disputes a charge with their bank after receiving the product, or when an attacker uses stolen cards to purchase from your store and the legitimate cardholder files a claim afterwards.

This type of fraud is estimated to cost 28.1 billion dollars globally in 2026.

For every euro of fraudulent purchase, the merchant loses an average of 3.60 euros.

This includes:

  • Lost product
  • Shipping costs
  • Payment processor fees
  • Administrative costs of the dispute

4. Your customers’ accounts get hijacked and purchases are made with their saved cards

61% of all account takeover attacks target ecommerce stores.

Attackers purchase databases of leaked credentials and automatically test username and password combinations across thousands of stores.

Because many users reuse the same password across different services, attackers find valid accounts with ease.

5. 40% of your website traffic is not human

In ecommerce, approximately 40% of web traffic is generated by bots.

These bots can:

  • Test stolen cards
  • Launch credential stuffing attacks
  • Scrape prices or product catalogs
  • Generate fake orders

Beyond direct fraud, they also distort your analytics and slow down your website.

6. Someone may be capturing card details at your checkout

Digital skimming attacks inject malicious code into your checkout’s JavaScript. Every time a customer enters their card details, that information is also sent to the attacker.

The merchant sees nothing unusual. Neither does the customer.

7. Triangulation fraud

The attacker creates a store with extremely cheap products.

When someone buys there, the scammer purchases the same product from your store using a stolen card and sets the shipping address to the final buyer’s address.

You process the order and ship it.

Weeks later, the chargeback arrives.

And you lose both the product and the money.

What can your business do?

Most of these attacks share a pattern: they exploit a lack of visibility.

Many businesses do not monitor similar domains, do not audit the permissions of their plugins, and do not check whether their team’s credentials have appeared in data breaches. It is not about becoming a cybersecurity expert. It is about having continuous visibility into what is happening around your digital business.