Almost every household these days has access to the internet. Smart phones have made it easy for people to stay connected to each other across the globe. This brings a huge volume of entities on the internet that eventually raises security threats even more than we can think of! E-commerce is one such industry that has high potential of attracting different security threats. Most e-commerce firms hold sensitive information about consumers that could include credit and debit card details as well. The ecommerce industry can be considered as the most vulnerable industry that experiences 32.4% of attack in any form, because many of these sites and apps have a vast storage of sensitive data and critical information that tempts malicious elements to a great extent. Working with a experienced e-commerce development company can help you make your website immune to security issues because they have keep abreast of latest trends and take steps to ensure that your website is safe from all known sources of malicious attacks.
Some important e-commerce cybercrime statistics are as follows –
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29% of website traffic is there to harm you
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According to 50% of small businesses, these attacks are becoming more severe and sophisticated at the same time
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Again 92.4% of malware is delivered through email
The effect of these types of attacks on sites developed for e-commerce companies is shocking. 43% of cyber-attacks are aimed at only small companies. 54% of companies experienced one or more attacks that affect the company negatively. 60% of small businesses that suffer cyber-attack do not survive more than six months.
Security risks associated with e-commerce portals can be a result of human error, some accident or unauthorized access to systems. Online retailers are more prone to credit card fraud or data errors. The various types of attacks on e-commerce sites and online merchants are as follows –
Credit/debit card frauds
This is the most common online fraud that retailers face. These occur when hackers gain unauthorized access to customers personal and payment information. For this, the cyber criminals may access the database of an e-commerce site by seeking help from malicious software programs. Many a times, a hacker steals customer data to sell it on the black market. Credit and debit card frauds have been one of the most common types of attack, where people complain of fraudulent transactions.
Man-in-the-middle attacks
As technology is getting way more advanced, hackers are discovering new ways to be a part of the user’s communication with an e-commerce website. With the help of an approach known as the man-in-the-middle attack, hackers can trick users to connect to a public network. This helps the online cyber criminals to gain access to people’s devices when they are on public wireless networks. If the websites visited by users lack strong encryptions, hackers resort to unauthorized methods to view browsing history, passwords, user names and credit card numbers.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
This is a type of security threat that aims to take down online retail stored where hackers send a number of requests to the servers of the e-commerce portal to cause an over load. These attacks usually originate from thousands of untraceable IP addresses. When, this type of threat usually hit servers, it causes them to slow down or shut down completely. Usually when this type of attack happens on a server, the e-commerce site can also go temporarily offline.
Malware
Malware usually refers to malicious software programs. Online attackers usually insert web pages or files that comprise of these malicious programs. These programs help them gain access to online retail stores. With the help of methods like SQL injection, malware is easily inserted into the database of an e-commerce website that with the intent to compromise data. Most online retailers complain of malware being injected which resulted in data breach.
Bad bots
Bots are very popular throughout the web. Popular search engines like Bing or Google use bots for indexing search results. There are hackers that use malicious bots to gather information about product data, inventories and pricing data. These bots can access the database of an e-commerce site and retrieve a list of logins of user accounts.
Phishing scams
This type of scam is sent by known or unknown people through emails. It targets important user data like login credentials or credit card numbers. An attacker may also lure shoppers to get their personal information. When it is sent as an email to an online shopper, a phishing scam may contain links to a malicious website that resembles an existing e-commerce companies website.
Solutions to reduce e-commerce security issues
Some of the best solutions to curb issues related to e-commerce are as follows –
Always go for PCI Complain Hosting Provider
PCI complaint hosting providers usually have stringent processes and policies that guarantee secure payments. This also ensures that online shoppers can use debit or credit card to buy any type of goods or services safely. Some of the measures included by them are risk analysis, use of anti-malware software and encryption, and extensive monitoring. Apart from this, online retailers should ask the e-commerce development company that they work with to deploy PCI updates and scans to prevent any type of security threats.
Go for strong passwords
Strong passwords make it difficult for hackers to gain access to login credentials. A strong combination of alphabetical letters and numbers can make it difficult for hackers to crack passwords.
Try to avoid single storage and backup
Always try to avoid accumulation of data on a single server, instead go for multiple servers or cloud servers to distribute your data in the form of cloud clusters globally. Renowned cloud providers are highly reliable as they take a backup on multiple servers online and offline.
Go for an address verification system (AVS)
Credit card processing becomes easy with the help of an address verification system (AVS). This system can compare customer’s billing address against the information that is stored by the issuer of credit card. This can block suspicious transactions if the information stored does not match with what is stored on the credit card issuer’s database.
Use SSL certificates
For facilitating secure user connections, it is compulsory for e-commerce websites to have SSL certificates. This authenticates the identity of online retail business and secures a user’s check out data. This also keeps customers secure from financial fraud or information loss. The e-commerce development company that you work with can add codes to ensure that pages where sensitive information is collected are protected properly.
Credit/debit card frauds, malware, bad bots, man-in-the-middle attacks, phishing scams and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks are some of the common security issues that affect e-commerce portals. Some of the common ways to resolve the issue are using SSL certificates, strong passwords, going for PCI Complain Hosting Providers and using a proper Address Verification System (AVS). It is also better to avoid single storage and back up space to protect the consumer data on these platforms.