Electronic commerce nowadays is used by many businesses to trend on the market. Almost every business wants to be online. Customers can be in the comfort of their home with their devices and chose products/services, place order and make payments. This is time saving and less stressful for today’s very busy people. This era of ecommerce has issues associated to it especially when it comes to security. Privacy issues, Denial-of-Service Attacks and Phishing, are examples of three major security threats that are currently posed to ecommerce systems.

Privacy issues

Privacy is an issue today for ecommerce systems because the consumer’s private information collected by the ecommerce company might fall in the wrong hands such as hackers. The e-Commerce sites collect users’ credit card details, usernames, passwords and other information. Customers are concerned about the fact that, if these details fall in the wrong hands, they could live their life without.

The company can lose customers and reputation; have credibility and trust issues when customers’ details are stolen.

To counter privacy issues, it is recommend that ecommerce and credit card companies do their best to keep the Privacy Policies and implement high security, use password or biometrics, firewalls and data encryption so that hackers cannot even access the information to talk of getting it.

Denial-of-Service (DoS)

DoS attacks are technical attacks used by attackers to breach into a system to interrupt the normal functionality of the computer system or deny the complete processing.

In DoS, attackers load the target computer or server with too many illegitimate requests it can handle. The network is then overloaded with requests that may result in the denial of the requests of its real users.

The ecommerce company can lose its customer database and customers, the server can be corrupted and that can result in decline of business and revenue loss.

To overcome this attack, it is recommended that system administrators have a well monitored network, monitoring of traffic to quickly detect any little unusual activity before it is late by using DoS attacks detection software. They also need to use firewalls and antivirus software.

 Phishing

Phishing is a spam whereby hackers setup a website that appears as the original ecommerce website in order to collect confidential information from individuals or organizations by playing the role of the legitimate ecommerce site 

Individuals and companies are sent emails, links, messages, and even given phone calls that seem coming from a known organization with which they have relationships. They are then tricked to give away their privacy by providing information on bank accounts, passwords, and others.

The ecommerce company can lose its credibility because users will find it difficult to identify which of the websites is the original; have trust issues resulting in decrease in customer base and revenue.

To prevent phishing, ecommerce companies need to educate users on the phishing activities. Customers should be encouraged to personally contact the ecommerce company when contacted to provide confidential information.