Risks Associated with e-Commerce

Introduction

E-commerce i.e. the exchange of goods and services on the internet has a number of retail brands that have an online presence. Business to business transactions are also a part of e-Commerce.

The recent trend of multichannel retail allows a number of additional transactions like purchasing online and pick up in store along with the traditional features of buying online and delivering services.

The paper gives an overview of privacy and security of e-commerce. It discusses various risks associated with all e-commerce web server and states the solution to obtain a secure system. It further discusses the security overview, common security threats and the technological solutions.

Risk of Ecommerce

With time, the methods used by ecommerce sites to use and store credit card information has become further sophisticated than the earlier days of online shopping. This has helped online shopping conquer one of its utmost obstacles, consumer trust. Now people feel more secure in shopping online than they have in the past. Sadly, the methods used by cyber criminals try and steal the customer’s data have made it easier for them to conciliate the system.

Credit card credential theft: Credit card security is one of the major components of e-commerce. Most sites are vulnerable to the following types of attacks:

• SQL Injection

• Session Hijacking

• Malware

• Cross-site Scripting

• Path Traversal

Business Interruption: A competitor or an attacker can compromise the system to use the resources of the server like bandwidth, processing power, disk space ect.

It leads to denial of services and prevents the customer from reaching the website leading to a loss in revenue and customer website relations.

Brand D...

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...a computer system.

Hackers with a criminal content are called crackers. Hackers may be hired by corporations to find weakness, cause harm or disrupt a system.

• Cyber vandalism is referred to an intentional disruption of functionality or destruction of a website.

• Data breach is the loss of corporate information of an organization to an outsider

• Credit Card Fraud.

• Spoofing is misrepresentation of someone as someone else. Spoofing of website is called pharming. These are carried out by hacking the DNS server.

• Denial of Service attacks- flooding of website with useless traffic to overwhelm network.

Technology Solutions

• Protecting network through firewall

• Securing Channels of communication using SSL, S-HTTP, VPNs.

• Protecting Internet communications through encryption.

• Protecting Servers and clients

Site Security Tools