E-commerce is basically the process of buying and selling commodities and goods over the Internet. In E-commerce, transactions take place via digital methods via electronic funds and the processing of online transactions.
Since E-commerce deals with the transfer of money digitally, hackers and attackers use this as an opportunity to break into E-commerce websites and gain some financial profit from them.
E-commerce Security:
- E-commerce Security basically deals with a set of protocols specially designed for E-commerce platforms to process electronic transactions with security. E-commerce Security helps to buy and sell goods over the Internet with full protection and security.
- The absence of E-commerce Security leads to the loss of the banking credentials of the customers, the leaking of private sensitive information of users, phishing attacks, stealing of money, and frauds related to credit cards.
- Electronic payment system which is an essential part of E-commerce Security helps to operate in a user-friendly manner and avoids difficult documentation procedures and also saves some cost of transactions.
- E-commerce Security enables to provide security to Electronic payment systems so that they can easily process the data and transfer electronic funds with security in an easy manner.
Types of threats to E-commerce:
- Tax Evasion: Organizations show the legal paper records of revenue to the IRS. But in the case of E-commerce shopping, online transactions take place due to which funds get transferred electronically due to which IRS is not able to count the transactions properly and there are high chances of tax evasions by these organizations.
- Payment conflict: In E-commerce, payment conflicts can arise between users and the E-commerce platforms. These electronic funds transferring systems might process extra transactions from the users which will lead to a payment conflict by the users due to some glitches or errors.
- Financial fraud: Whenever an online transaction or transfer of funds takes place, it always asks for some pin or passwords to authenticate and allows only the authorized person to process the transactions. But due to some spyware and viruses used by attackers, they can also process the transactions of the users by allowing the unauthorized person, which will lead to causing a financial fraud with the user.
- E-wallets: E-wallets are now an essential part of E-commerce platforms. Attack on E-wallets can lead to the leak of the sensitive banking credentials of the users which can be used by the attackers for their own profit. Regulators tend to monitor all the activities related to the financial security of the money of the users.
- Phishing: It is one of the most common attacks nowadays on the users, where the attackers send emails and messages to a large number of users which contain a special link in it. When the users open that link in their browser, the malware starts downloading in the background and the attacker gets full control over the financial information about the users. They make fake websites to make the users believe their website and fill out their financial credentials.
- SQL injections: SQL injections are used by attackers to manipulate the database of large organizations. Attackers enter malicious code full of malware into the database and then they search for targeted queries in the database and then they collect all the sensitive information in the database.
- Cross-site scripting (XSS): Hackers target the website of E-commerce companies by entering malicious code into their codebase. It is a very harmful attack as the control of the entire website goes into the hands of the attackers. It can enable the attackers to track the users by using their browsing activity and their cookies. For More details please read the what is cross-site scripting XSS article.
- Trojans: Attackers make software that may appear to be useful before downloading, but after downloading the software it installs all the malicious programs on the computer. It collects data like personal details, address, email, financial credentials and it may cause data leaks.
- Brute force attacks: Hackers draw patterns and use random methods to crack into someone else’s account as an unauthorized user. It requires the use of multiple algorithms and permutations and combinations to crack the password of an account by the attacker.
- Bots: The hackers use a large number of bots on E-commerce websites to track the competitor in the E-commerce industry rankings and his user’s buying policies in order to scrap the sales and revenue of the competitor. It also decreases the ranking of their E-commerce website as compared to the competitors due to bad experiences faced by the users. It results in overall price decreasing and less revenue overall in sales.
- DDoS attacks: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are most commonly used by hackers to not allow original legitimate users to access and buy and sell products from the E-commerce platforms. Hackers use a large number of computers to flood the number of requests to the server so that at one time the server crashes out.
- Skimming: Skimming is a popular method to spread out the malware on the website’s main pages which are used by a large number of people. It steals and leaks all information entered by the users on that webpage and all this information goes to the attacker through skimming.
- Middlemen attack: In this type of attack, the attacker can clearly get all the information in the conversation taking place between the consumer and the E-commerce platform itself. The attacker sees the conversation between both of them and uses this as an opportunity to make the user face some vulnerability.
Prevent threats:
We can prevent the following E-commerce threats in the following ways:
- Anti-malware: We can deploy Anti-malware and Anti-virus software on all our computer systems so that we can prevent these conditions to happen. Anti-malware and Anti-virus software prevent all types of malware and viruses to infect the data on our computer.
- HTTPS: HTTPS helps to keep the website data secure from any kind of digital attack. SSL and HTTPS encrypt all the data of the users which is harder to crack by the hackers.
- Payment gateway: We can secure the payment gateway used on the E-commerce websites which very high security and strict policies against leaking of any financial credentials of any user.