(Solved Homework): Suppose your business had an e-commerce Website where it sold goods and…

E-commerce includes all transactions of services, money and products across world wide web. it is prone to several risks and threats

Threats

Physical threats –Natural disasters and human incidents like hardware vandalism

Privacy threat –Making customer and company information unavailable to others-security of information

Data integrity– where data travels and gets stored without alteration

Authentication-Make sure that the user is the person who says he is

Technical Attacks-

• To paralyze the activity of the e-commerce site e.g. Denial-of service attacks
• By sending fake IP packets, permanently changing the software by updates
• Malware
• Brute force attacks

Non-Technical Attacks

• Phishing- done by using impostor emails that look like authenticated ones to get the customers credentials, credit card numbers
• Trojans horse
• Network spoofing
• Social engineering

Impact-

• Entire website and functioning of servers may be paralyzed
• User data with credentials and important information like credit card numbers may be stolen
• Data may be tampered on the way of transfer
• Financial loss, reputation loss etc.

How to protect

The company should involve an IT security team to make special efforts to protect against attacks. They can outsource certain functions like payment gateway. There are secure payment gateway solutions like CCA Avenue which take care of entire payment processes

Physical threats

• Physical protection with armed guards and physical infrastructure
• Alternate location and servers for service continuity during disasters and accidents

Privacy threats –

• Authentication with passwords and user ID
• Disclosure about privacy policy to consumer
• Digital signature

Data integrity and theft-

• A data hash or checksum- CRC, and public key infrastructures (PKI) to protect against data tampering
• Use of Firewalls
• Data encryption – to avoid phishing and protect data from tampering
• SSL – Secure Sockets Layer – helps to transfer secure information – creates encrypted channel for data transfer
• Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) – SET protocol prevents merchants from accessing the customer payment information

Others

• Social engineering, phishing -Security certificate for website and anti-virus soft wares
• Authentication- Digital signature for users and employees
• Phishing- Security certificate for website and anti-virus soft wares
• Trojans horse – anti-virus soft wares like Norton
• Frequent security audits