Essay On Internet Commerce

RESEARCH PAPER

ON

Security Issues in Internet Commerce

I. Introduction

Information security is more about protecting three things: the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of data. Professionals may face the biggest challenge in protecting Internet commerce. Internet commerce didn’t exist few years ago, but today it is attracting huge financial interest. Investors are enthusiastically supporting companies that give assurance to deliver the hardware and software required for Internet commerce.

What is Internet commerce?

For many companies, Internet commerce is nothing but receiving credit card orders from customers spending electronic catalogs on the World Wide Web (WWW). For other companies Internet commerce involves trading electronically with clients and suppliers, as a substitute to private, leased-line EDI (Electronic Document Interchange). This kind of Internet usage is sometimes called as tunneling or VPN (Virtual Private Network). A third area of Internet commerce, is digital authentication. The issues involved in Internet commerce affect large and small companies. According to a Yankee Group survey, as of January 1999, half of all businesses with more than 1,000 employees had at least one Web site. It also found that approximately two thirds of all companies which have web sites had less than 100 employees. The Internet has become attractive to smaller companies because it enables them to reach a widespread audience with as impressive presence as that created by much large companies. At the same time, most of the major corporations see enough potential to invest significant dollars over $500,000 per company in the category of 1000 employees and more.

II. Security Problems

The security problem...

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...curity infractions are by insiders and the figure is comparable or higher for credit card and commercial fraud),

* Continued hacking (systems will need to evolve as hacking eats away at current technology - the process is iterative and never-ending),

* Social engineering (without proper security awareness training, organizations will continue to be susceptible to costly social engineering attacks),

* Malicious code (this will continue to impose overhead on all open network systems and is likely to prosper in enhanced functionality environments such as Java and OLE, the Microsoft

Internet Safe Code Initiative notwithstanding),

* reliability and performance (problems with backbones and DNS servers are common at the moment and most current dial-up PPP connections are notoriously unreliable and slow, which will probably not improve until there is widespread use of ISDN)