Monday, May 16, 2022

E-commerce and Cybersecurity: What Online Merchants Should Know

Best Practices to Secure Your E-Commerce Business

By: Sentia   Categories:Security, Cyber Security, Data Security

E-commerce and Cybersecurity: What Online Merchants Should Know

E-commerce platforms and sites are hot targets for attacks and breaches since cybercriminals consider them as treasure troves of financial, personal, and business data. Regardless of the business size, a breach of an e-commerce platform can cause huge financial losses by destroying customer trust, lawsuits, and stolen data. eCommerce businesses are mindful of the security issues facing them and have increased spending on security measures. A 2020 VMWare Carbon Black Cybersecurity Outlook Report revealed that 77% of companies included in the study have invested in new security measures, whereas 69% have hired more security personnel.

However, the more online retailers leverage innovative and emerging technologies to enhance their operations and remain competitive, the more cybercriminals hone their skills to exploit existing vulnerabilities and compromise the privacy and security of e-commerce platforms. In particular, e-commerce payment fraud is prevalent, and experts estimate it will cost e-commerce merchants approximately $40.62 billion by 2027. Also, e-commerce cyber fraud continues to target both businesses and customers increasingly. For example, consider the following statistics on eCommerce cyber fraud:

  1. E-commerce businesses deal with at least 206,000 web attacks on average every month.
  2. In 2020, successful e-commerce fraud attempts increased by 43% from 43% for mid-to-large sized e-commerce businesses and by 27% for small-sized e-commerce businesses.
  3. 54% of eCommerce customers reported having encountered suspicious actions and fraudulent activities when transacting over the internet. Also, 21% of e-commerce consumers fear that attackers may compromise and steal their credit card data, while 19% believe cyber adversaries may breach and misuse their personal information.
  4. Cybersecurity experts estimate that eCommerce fraudsters will cause e-commerce businesses to lose more than $12 billion.

Biggest Security Threats to E-Commerce Businesses

  1. Phishing attacks: Phishing attacks use social engineering methods to trick victims into divulging sensitive information, such as social security numbers, bank account numbers, e-commerce, and site passwords, among others. During COVID-19, eCommerce fraud associated with phishing attacks accounted for 250% of eCommerce fraud rates. Furthermore, Google reported that coronavirus-themed phishing websites targeting eCommerce businesses surged by 350%.
  2. Ransomware attacks: Attackers execute ransomware to encrypt eCommerce platforms and prevent businesses from accessing networks and devices to process critical information, such as payment data. As a result, the resulting downtime becomes expensive since online e-commerce transactions cannot be completed. A recent report revealed that ransomware attacks hit 44% of retailers with eCommerce sites, and 54% of the attacks successfully encrypted critical information causing prolonged downtime and financial losses.
  3. Friendly fraud: Not all security threats emanate from cybercriminals seeking to steal data or steal money. In some cases, friendly fraud is a common threat to e-commerce platforms that occurs when a customer knowingly makes a purchase using a debit or credit card and then disputes the transaction to get a refund from the bank. The threat is highly prevalent since almost 40% of all eCommerce business merchants worldwide reported having encountered friendly fraud attacks. Friendly fraud accounted for nearly 30% of fraud losses in the US alone.

Best Practices for Securing your E-commerce Business

1.Strong Password Policies

While companies have an obligation to ensure the security and privacy of user data, your eCommerce business can help customers protect their eCommerce accounts by requiring a minimum level of password security. For example, you can mandate all customers to create passwords containing at least a special character, uppercase, and lowercase alphabetical letters, numbers, and eight characters. Strong passwords are a proven deterrence of different threats facing eCommerce business platforms. For example, they can protect against dictionary attacks, brute-force attacks, and password guessing attacks.

2.Implementing Fraud Prevention Software

Securing your eCommerce business site from internet scams and boot attacks requires the implementation of a coherent layer of fraud prevention technologies across all endpoints, including the internet site, APIs, and mobile applications. The fraud prevention technologies and tools process data obtained from servers and clients in real-time, evaluate it, and analyze it using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms before allowing it to access the eCommerce site. In addition, fraud prevention tools enable the detection of identity fraud, scraped data, and DDOS attacks, among others.

3.Implementing Strong Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms

Verification protocols can help your eCommerce business verify the accuracy and authenticity of a customer’s billing and shipping addresses. As such, in case there is a conflict, the care provider can use the verification details to determine whether the legitimate account holder completed the payment transaction on your eCommerce platform. Moreover, strong authentication and authorization mechanisms ensure that only the legitimate owner can access their accounts in your eCommerce platform. For example, suppose cyber adversaries access your customers’ login credentials, authentication and authorization schemes can prevent them from gaining unauthorized access.

4.Round the Clock Monitoring

Monitoring card declines and paper trails are effective methods of preventing eCommerce fraud. Maintaining solid records is a recommended security approach, especially for eCommerce businesses that trade services and products over the internet. Thus, in case a customer attempts to commit friendly eCommerce fraud, you can produce the documentation that the purchase was completed. In addition, you can leverage built-in eCommerce tools to record delivery and shipment data for easy retrieval when the need arises. Also, you can maintain all email communications for a given period for future reference to demonstrate conclusively that a transaction was completed.

Ways Sentia Can Help

Our secure managed network offers you a fully managed solution with built-in security, allowing your entire network to work together to protect your IT resources and achieve optimal performance. We will customize a solution to fits your unique needs in the areas of unified security management, high-performance wireless access, detailed usage report, and much more. Sentia’s secure network access solutions help manage the evolution of the modern enterprise network for on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. Our wired and wireless solutions are complemented by streamlined onboarding practices to provide high value to your organization, protect against security breaches and reputational damage from cyber-attacks, gain insight with compliance reporting, and Improve scalability with intelligent Access Points. Contact Sentia today to learn more.

Sentia
Sentia

Sentia

We are a high-value, trusted, Canadian IT solutions provider dedicated to delivering secure and reliable IT solutions across a wide variety of industries. We are committed to helping our customers meet and optimize their business goals.

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