Current Challenges in E-commerce Security

Security issues have always been the number one challenge for the e-commerce industry. Despite having a good marketing strategy and remarkable website design, your entire website, as well as your firm, can be easily ruined by a simple DDoS attack or other cyber threats. Threats to e-commerce security are rising day by day and have been compromising the data of both organizations and customers.

The Dynamic CISO recently published an article and revealed that a hacker group broke into nearly 570 e-commerce stores in 55 countries, including in India, in the past three years! The group leaked the information of 184,000+ stolen credit cards and generated over $7 million by selling compromised payment cards.

The e-commerce industry is known to be the highest vulnerable industry in terms of cybersecurity. Did you know that over 60% of e-commerce websites lack HTTPS? This means that sensitive information of customers especially the credit card number details is not secure online.

Without having the essential security procedures in place, the e-commerce companies are possibly at great risk of losing the data of customers and ultimately their revenue.

On the other hand, the fact that hackers and cybercriminals are nowadays using sophisticated and advanced technologies to attempt cyber attacks doesn’t help either. They have found better ways to exploit security loopholes and confidential data of users from online stores. 

Over the past recent years, threats to e-commerce security have made a major impact on the industry. Here is a list of shocking statistics about the e-commerce industry found in the cybersecurity surveys and reports of the past recent years:

1. 60% of companies are known to have their business shut down within six months of being impacted by the security attack.

2. Within 6 six months of 2020, Magecart attacks targeted small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses almost daily.

3. About 29% of the e-commerce website traffic holds the malicious intent of cyber attacks.

4. Reportedly, an e-commerce fraud results $660,000 in losses per hour!

5. 25% of data breaches are mostly targeted on the payment used in e-commerce transactions. 

These statistics indicate the high potential for e-commerce security threats soon. Apart from these impacts, various cybersecurity threat postures badly affect e-commerce security. Proceed further to know the top five security attacks in the e-commerce industry.

Types of Security Attacks in E-commerce

DDOS Attack

Distributed Denial of Service attack refers to the hampering of server, service or network traffic due to overcrowding traffic flow. The cyber threat actor seeks to make a network or machine resource unavailable for the intended users by temporarily disrupting the services of the host that is connected to the internet. 

Credit Card Fraud

The most common and harmful security threat that e-commerce sites face is credit card fraud. In a credit card fraud, a fraudster or a thief uses the stolen card or the details from the card to make unauthorized purchases, in the name of the targeted user.

They take advantage of stolen card information to withdraw cash using the user’s account. There are several different ways in which cybercriminals hack credit card details or attempt fraudulent activities to target credit cardholders.

Password Breaches

One of the biggest e-commerce security threats is the password breach in which cybercriminals hack into the databases of organizations and steal their sensitive information. The data is further exposed to the public including account numbers, names, social security numbers, and almost every personal information.

Malware Attack

Malware attacks like ransomware hijack the targeted user’s system, web server, and all the confidential data for some time and demand a certain amount of money in exchange for returning the user’s data.

Just like malware attacks, web application attack is also a serious security threat for e-commerce websites where cyber threat actors exploit the weakness and vulnerabilities to gain access to the organization’s databases to churn their sensitive data. 

Phishing 

A social engineering attack is the most infamous hack to manipulate human psychology. This attack is used for malicious activities like phishing. It is a successful attempt at tricking victims and exploiting the sensitive information of users.

Phishing sites, spear-phishing, and whaling are some online security threats that are leveraged to target users by masquerading as the legitimate source to get user’s information.

Phishing techniques not only exploit the data of organizations but also compromise their customers’ data for malicious intent. From these e-commerce security threats, it can be concluded that attackers are majorly after:

• Stealing the sensitive data of customers online 
• The exploitation of critical financial data of companies

Solutions to Prevent E-commerce Security from Threats

E-commerce is constantly growing at a fast pace, not to forget that a lot of sensitive information is present there and along with transactions taking place every day.

Organizations in the e-commerce industry must take extra security measures. The following solutions are very effective in protecting the domain from e-commerce threats:

• Check for Vulnerabilities 

Every e-commerce company must comply with certain security standards that credit card companies require. Although these standards are not enough to protect everything alone.

Therefore, it is important to test the health and security of e-commerce websites regularly to prevent hackers from attempting any real damage to the website. A regular VAPT can mitigate the risk of cyber threats by detecting and patching the exploitable vulnerabilities.

• SSL Certificate

Secure Sockets Layer certificate is a crucial cybersecurity measure to keep data present on the website protected against any sort of cyber attack.

The SSL certificate puts a lock icon and HTTPS to the web address, creating an encrypted link to prevent attackers from eavesdropping or sniffing for the information or communication taking place.

• PCI DSS Compliance

The PCI DSS compliance stands for Payment Card Industry- Data Security Standard. This standard contains a series of security requirements that every e-commerce company must implement regardless of scale and size.

The compliance mandates creating and maintaining security policies to secure the environment. It includes all the rules about web hosting and security level at the payment processing level.

• Training for Employees 

The best solution to secure your organization against e-commerce security threats is to train employees about the importance of data security.

Educating employees is the main line of defense against e-commerce security threats and information security breaches. Provide the best in class security awareness training to employees to make them proactive against the ever-evolving cyber attacks.

• Brand Monitoring 

It is important to keep an eye out for malicious activities taking place against the website or application to save the of trouble cyber attack.

Implementation of a special tool for stringent brand monitoring will help in tracking down every fraudulent activity taking place online in the name of your brand.

It will also help in keeping your website and application secured against phishing and copyright infringement practices. 

Remember, one critical failure can cost your company more than recoverable damages. These smart approaches will help you in securing and preventing e-commerce threats that are risking your immediate online environment.

Besides, the best approach to protect from e-commerce threats is to invest in e-commerce security solutions the same way you invest in its marketing and website designing. 

If you have ideas, tips or tricks in this relevant domain, do let us know. We’ll appreciate your views in the comments section below! 

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Kratikal

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