Technology is evolving day by day. With this advancement, and digitalization in every field you can perform almost all the activities using the internet.
In fact, shopping is not an exception; perhaps e-commerce sites are the most suitable platform for online shopping. The trend is not static; the growth is exponential. The sites are indeed using the advanced form algorithm and data analysis technique to personalize the content.
With all these features and a lot of option, this has now become the first opinion for shopping. However, there are a lot of hidden factors involved in this process, which we either fail to recognize and or ignore them as a whole.
Such as, the essential part is security. The E-Commerce sites store all your information, for instance, credit card details, Bank Account details and Personal information to make your future experience smooth.
However, without a proper security measurement, the sites always run at a risk of losing all your personal data. That will also inversely affect the revenue as well.
According to a study conducted by LexisNexis on E-commerce fraudulent transactions. The report revealed that the digital platforms are more likely to get blitzed. Whereas, the physical retail stores are far away from this E-commerce security threats. On the other hand, the white collar thieves are becoming smarter with this technical innovation and advancements.
Due to this, the E-commerce sites have to deal with some security threats.
The Security Threats Faced By The Online Retail Stores
Online security threats are most likely to associate with Human errors. Sometimes due to an accident, it might happen even unauthorized system access can also trigger the fraudulent activities.
While on the other hand, e-commerce sites get exposed to the vulnerabilities due to credit card fraud, man-in-the-middle attack, and so on.
Credit Card Fraud
This is the most common security threat faced by the online retail stores. When a hacker successfully gets through to the customer’s database, they can use it for their ill intention. They first penetrate the e-commerce database using the advanced malicious software and break their firewall. Sometimes, they still all the payment details and personal details to sell them off to the black market.
Distributed Denial Of Services (DDoS) Attack
It is a kind of malicious attack which temporarily blocks or slow down the targeted server. This type of attack aims to take down the online retail store by repetitively sending an overwhelming request to the server.
Tracing the attack is not so easy, as the coder use different untraceable IP addresses originated from different locations.
The whole idea is to pull down the site by flashing down the site speed or blocking the features of the site. Even a big e-commerce site can go offline due to this fraudulent activities.
Man-In-The-Middle Attack
As mentioned earlier, with the technical advancement of the hackers are becoming more smarter these days. Now they are coming up with the techniques and tricks to get into the communication made by an online e-commerce website users.
With the man-in-the-middle approach, the hackers are uplifting the users to connect to the public wireless network. Once the users are connected to the public server, then they can access all the browsing history and related information.
They can even track down the personal details filled by the users in the e-commerce site. If the site encryption is not strong enough then breaking the wall will not be difficult for any hacker.
Bad Bots
Bots are the familiar term for world wide web, either a good bot or a bad bot; they crawl over all the internet page. If you talk about good bots, then Google search engine Bing and other search engines use their bot to crawl the content of the web page to index them on SERPS
However, hackers use bad bots to get the information from the web page. Bad bot, also crawls through the web pages to collect uses personal information. They can even get into e-commerce sites to capture all the login details of the users.
Malware
As per the information technology language, malware means the malicious software programme, designed to get unauthorized access to any file or server. Hackers put that into the e-commerce server to gain access to the user’s personal information.
Phishing Scams
Even the e-commerce websites are not immune to the phishing scams. They also get an email from known and unknown accounts. The virus is sent in the form of email aiming to still important details, such as credit card number, login credential payment information.
They attach various links just same e-commerce site to lure the customer to give away their personal information.
Best Practice to Ditch The online Security Threats
These fraudulent activities are causing serious monetary damage to the online retailer. To deal with this e-commerce merchant and payment companies should join hand and face this problem without impacting the user experience. Here are some of the best practice, adopting this will resolve the issue and also will not impact badly on websites consumer experience.
PCI Compliant Hosting Provider
This process helps to provide strict and advanced policies to ensure a secure payment gateway. PCI compliant Hosting also makes sure the user use their credit card or debit card securely to make payment for goods or services.
Along with that, it also provides facilities like malware protection, hight encrypted codes, and constant monitoring.
Address Verification System (AVS)
This is the safest process to proceed with the credit card payment. This will let the e-commerce service provider verify the address to the information stored with the credit card provider with the billing address.
In case the information doesn’t match with the credit card providers it will block the transaction automatically.
Require Stronger Password
The main reason behind the scam is hackers can easily determine the password used by the users. Almost all the e-commerce websites fail to initiate 3D secure password. So, hackers can easily decode the password using an algorithm. The 3D secure password for example. alphanumeric with special characters can make a password strong, and unbreakable.
SSL Certificate
This is not essential it’s more of mandatory, so that, they can provide a safe passage to the users. The certificate is also useful for authenticating the identity of an online service provider as well as securing the checkout credential information. It can also keep the customers safe from online data loss and fraudulent activities.
Final Thought
To grow in the e-commerce business, security is the most essential aspect that should not be ignored. With the technical advancements, the hackers reach is unlimited. In this case, both e-commerce merchants and the payment gateway provide should join their hands and fight with the situation and bring out the best solution.
The threat is not only monetary, it also affects the reputation of the e-Commerce websites. With proper tool and technique, the security threats can easily be avoided.
