E commerce security threats and solutions

07 OCT 2021

With the evolution of technology, online shopping has become a more convenient option for consumers, this has helped companies to engage with customers in numerous ways, increasing their sales and becoming profitable. With the growing benefits, there are lots of security threats that e-commerce companies face.

Let’s look at the different types of e-commerce security threats and solutions that every business should be aware of,

• Financial fraud:

In the world of e-commerce, financial fraud is a serious risk that businesses must always be aware of. Attackers can exploit weaknesses in payment systems to steal money, potentially causing catastrophic losses for businesses and customers alike. As more organizations move to digital systems, it is increasingly important to understand the threats and develop effective solutions to secure their data and protect their customers. Fortunately, there are a number of measures that can be taken to mitigate these risks and ensure secure e-commerce transactions for everyone involved.

Solution:

Online consumers now have access to previously unheard-of financial services from banks, like live chat assistance, account blocking through customer care, and even the ability to revoke payments through applications, to help reduce this threat.

But this doesn’t completely protect buyers from getting fraud because the simple reason is that most do not check their bank records on occasion and this lapse allows cybercriminals to make numerous payments. Ecommerce companies should spread awareness about the services that help them from getting fraud.

Online buyers should also be aware of important web security markers such as HTTPS indicators and companies must seriously consider setting up PCI DSS standards to raise the safety levels of online transactions.

• Phishing:

Phishing, also known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, are a type of cyber-attack that targets customers of online stores through email, text message, or phone calls made under the false pretense of a reputable organization or in the name of well-known brands in order to trick people into disclosing personal information like passwords, banking information, and credit card information.

Solution:

Although DDoS attacks are rare, it is a major security risk that will cause trouble to your store and damage your reputation. To counter these kinds of attacks, you must have a DoS protection service that helps you monitor incoming traffic to the store and helps to notice and block fraudulent entries to your online stores.

It is also important to educate people about what they should do when they receive emails, how you operate, and how to identify you as legit, and customers need to know what they might be asked for and what might not.

•  Brute Force Attacks:

Brute force attack is a common password cracking technique that is used by hackers, where they will use a program to run through thousands of passwords in a hope of getting it right, and secondly, through informed guessing they will use pieces of information from the user’s life or through social media to identify the words that are most likely to appear as their passwords.

Solution:

The solution to getting protected from this kind of attack is simple. All you must do is regularly change the passwords and create intricate and complex passwords.

Secondly, you should use multi-factor authentication for the logins such as authentication codes sent via text message or e-mail. This helps to secure your and your client’s accounts from getting hacked.

• Bots:

Bots are both good and bad. Good bots help to crawl the web pages and determine the rank of your website on search engines, and some also help to chat with the customers.

Cybercriminals utilize bad bots to scrape websites for pricing and inventory, which changes the cost of the products and freezes popular items in shopping carts on the site, hurting sales and income.

Solution: 

The best security solution to prevent this kind of attack is to protect exposed API apps and mobile apps, e-commerce app owners must regularly inspect for traffic sources and then block those hosting providers and proxy servers.

• MITM Attacks:

A man-in-the-middle attack is a common type of security threat that e-business face which allows the attackers to spy on the conversation between two people and can imitate both.

The most important feature of this attack is that it is hard for a person to detect this attack, where the hackers can send you e-mails with links that would look genuine, and they will create websites that look exactly like the original websites so that users would not hesitate to enter confidential information.

Different kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks are IP Spoofing, HTTPS Spoofing, SSL hijacking, DNS spoofing, packet injection, e-mail hijacking, and stealing browser cookies.

Solution:

Having strong WEP/WAP encryption on access points prevents unwanted nearby users from joining your network by helping you to improve your website security.

You want to make sure to change your default server login credentials, or else attackers can change your DNS servers to their malicious servers, or even worse, they can infect your router with malicious software.

Using public key pair-based authentication also helps to ensure that you are communicating with the right person.

• Trojan horses and SQL injections

Trojan horse is a commonly used, and somewhat misused, term to refer to a malicious program that, when executed, may cause damage or data loss without the user’s knowledge. In general, Trojan horses are used to steal data that is stored on a computer system or to install malware that disrupts the functionality of the computer system.

Although a Trojan horse is normally written to inflict harm on a computer system, it can be used for good, as well. A Trojan horse that lures users into clicking on an attachment or visiting a website with malicious content may infect their computer with malware. WordPress sites that use Woo Commerce and Shopify are regularly targeted by malware via plugins and widgets upgrades.

SQL injections are a technique where hackers inject malicious code to target your database using query submission forms. Attackers can read, change, collect, add or delete data.

Solution:

Your problem is resolved by anti-malware software, which finds dangerous viruses and unwanted or unsafe applications that compromise the security of your e-commerce website. Additionally, it aids in the restoration of already corrupted files caused by viruses and guards against additional dangerous code modifications to software.

Conclusion:

As a responsible website owner, you must be aware of the security threats and solutions that your e-commerce websites face that affect your business goals.

It is also important for you to hire experienced consultants for your e-commerce website who can help you to get a secure innovative, speedy, best performance, and user experience website.