Cyber Attacks are on Rising: Ways to Implement to Secure E-commerce Business
The Cyber Attacks are increasing day by day in today’s online security world. Cyber-Attack is an attack by hackers to destroy a computer network or digital systems to altering the codes, scripts or logics. Millions of peoples are relying on the Internet to discover and share ideas on the world. The Cyber-Attacks mainly execute through the Internet where the attackers target the government sectors, banking sectors, health organizations and carried out users’ confidential information through malicious acts or viruses, fake websites, illegal web access, sending malicious emails from the targeted computer networks or websites.
Most data breaches appear on Holiday Seasons & Festival Seasons because for those days’ millions of people using the Internet through their online shopping. Most peoples is not aware of their security while shopping on seasons.
Top Most Cyber Criminal’s Activity Attacks
Denial-of-Service (DOS) Attack:
Cyber Criminals using this attack to interruption a network service for sending an unusual traffic or data across the network becomes an overwhelmed. A DOS attacks target’s banking sectors and payment gateways websites, which are hosted on the servers. DOS attacks used one computer and one connection to flood a server.
In Brute-Force Attack, an attacker tries to crack the difficult passwords using the combinations of letters, special symbol’s & numbers to enter a correct password. Using the Brute-Force method, any password can be cracked but the process will no longer to finish it. The complicated & difficult passwords take a long time in tries of all combinations.
Malware is a type of malicious software, which is designed to perform unwanted actions in the system. Malware like Viruses, Spyware, Trojan horses, Worms, etc. can drop some files, directories, and data without knowing the uses.
DDoS means a Distributed Denial of Service. The main purpose of a DDoS attack to sending unusual traffic from multiple sources for any online services until it becomes temporarily unavailable on the Internet. DDoS attacks used many computers and many Internet connections for sending the unwanted traffic to the network.
Ransomware is one type of malicious software, written in any programming language that can steal victim’s digital systems and encrypted files, which then ask for a ransom amount to grant the access back to their systems. As per Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report April-2015 (V20), In 2013 Ransomware attacks are around 4.1 million & increased more than doubled in 2014, which was 8.8 million.
Effects of Cyber attacks
The Cost of Business Security
The vision of any online businesses to protect themselves from the Internet theft from cybercriminals. The cost involves an identifying the business risks, to build a new and perfect operating measure, and purchasing high-security software & hardware. The companies hire a cybersecurity consultant to complete the security-related tasks & develop a protective business solution. Not end yet but the systems are regularly monitored daily to ensure that it is safe at cyber-attacks. The cost of all these very high & it will effect on customer’s goods & services.
Rethinking Business Approaches
The impact of Cyber-crime on Business is to rethink the customers’ data privacy and sensitive information, which are stored in their database. Make sure that it cannot be vulnerable. Cyber-Criminals looking for to obtain user’s information like passwords, login credentials, credit card number & then use it to harm the businesses & to decrease the company’s reputations. Due to Cyber-crime, many companies were failed to secure users’ financial information & business transaction; some of these businesses were shut down too.
Loss of Business Sale
In the last two years, many of the popular companies suffered from Cyber-Crimes. The major effect of it is, they lost their business sale because of to delay in the online transaction. The damage of Cyber-attack is very costly, and it can impact on the business relationship between a company & its valuable customers. As cyber-attack is more practical to go ahead with a primary step to save the business over the Internet.
Latest Security Breaches on E-commerce websites
The Cyber-Criminals tries to hack the E-commerce business database where users’ sensitive information & passwords saved on it. In the past couple of years, some big brands, Leading e-commerce & financial businesses, healthcare industry businesses, online retail stores were suffered from Cyber-Attacks. Not only these businesses affected by it but their customers too, their credit card information, Login Credentials, Personal Details, etc. were stolen in an attempt to attack. Let’s take a look at some popular e-commerce websites, which were affected by cyber-attacks.
eBay is one of the world’s largest and topmost e-commerce platforms where millions of customers buy & sell their products easily. In the year of 2014, Cyber Attack occurred on eBay in between February and March that was a major data breach effect on eBay’s reputation. There were millions of users’ affected with this cyber-attack. First, hackers cracked the eBay network, and then they steal customer’s login credentials like username, email address, encrypted passwords, birth date & phone numbers.
Target is the second largest online discount retailer store in US. Target suffered from a massive credit card data breach in the year of 2014. More Than 70 million shopper’s usernames, phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses had been stolen & also more than 40 million credit card & debit card numbers stole from cyber-attack.
The Home Depot is an online shop of home-improvement goods & services in USA. In 2014, The Home Depot has discovered about 56 million credit card and debit cards had been stolen by cyber-criminals & leaked 53 million customer email addresses. The Home Depot warned their customers about these phishing attacks via email addresses. Home Depot said attackers had stolen user’s credentials from a third-party vendor & used it to the outside of Home Depot’s network. These stolen username & password’s individuals did not provide direct access to the company’s point-of-sale devices.
Health Insurer Anthem Inc.
Anthem Inc., is the second largest health insurer suffered from data breach in year of 2015. The cyber-criminals hacked its server & also gained the access of the information of Social Security numbers, personal information from it. Before the attack, Millions of American peoples did not know, Anthem had taken their personal details but now they familiar. Anthem medical data breach was big which had impacted their online reputation & steal more than 37.5 million of record from their servers.
How to Prevent E-commerce from Security breaches?
Upgrade E-Commerce Business with an SSL
You must use an SSL to encrypt communication between the client and server while transmitting confidential information. Every business owner needs to secure their customers sensitive information and built a trustworthy relationship with them. E-Commerce Businesses collect consumer’s sensitive information and is responsible to secure it & no one misuse that information outside e-commerce website. Only solution of this, to install an SSL Certificate for your e-commerce business because SSL Certificate helps to prevent various threats over the Internet.
As per study on some of e-commerce stores, more than 61% of users denied to make an online purchase from sites that were missing a trust seals which creates a business identity which indicated that business is verified & secured by Trusted CA (Certificate Authority).
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that establishes a secured connection between client and server during information transmission. SSL secures a sensitive information such as credit card numbers, login credentials, business transaction information. SSL Certificate carries 3 types, as Domain Validation (DV) SSL, Organization Validation (OV) SSL & Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificate. EV SSL Certificate is highly recommended for e-commerce businesses as it helps them to deliver a high level of trust and display the green address bar and organization name where users can understand this business is genuine & verified by certificate authority.
How EV Helps an E-Commerce Business
- EV Delivers Strongest Encryption to Secure customer’s sensitive information & Business Transactions
- EV helps to increase user’s trust and business profits
- EV can Protect E-commerce Business from Cyber-Attacks, Man-in-Middle-Attack (MIMA) and sniffing attacks
- EV delivers customer’s confidence & build a Strong Relationship
- It Displays Green Address Bar along with Organization Name
- It enables user’s trust with an HTTPS Padlock
- It Boost E-Commerce Business Ranking in Search Engines as per Google Webmaster Blog
Upgrade Your E-commerce Business with PCI compliance
In today’s E-commerce world, generally customers are using their credit card & debit cards to shop online from a website. Millions of peoples are now associated with an E-commerce business, and they heard of the term of PCI Compliance but how’s important it on online business. The actual name of PCI is “PCI DSS” that means “Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standard”. It provides a set of security standards that every small and big-business owner must be followed who accept credit card payments in their websites. These standards help to ensure that online transactions are safe and secure & user’s card information is protected from cyber-criminals.
Mostly E-Commerce businesses to process online payment transactions, they are accepting the card payment via payment gateways, so they need to protect customer’s card information. A Payment Gateway is an e-commerce Application Service Provider that enables online payments. Most of Payment gateways like PayPal.com & authorize.net secure credit card information & to pass it securely between the merchant, customer & payment processor via an SSL Encryption. So these payment gateways need to confirm this information is secure and complies with PCI-DSS for online & offline orders.
Every online e-commerce business has a PA-DSS certificated payment gateway & checkout page must be PCI compliant because the customers are entering their credit card information in checkout page before the information is transferred to payment gateway. Online e-commerce business owners are liable for any responsibility due to non-compliance of PCI-DSS; so that e-commerce platform are required to be a PCI Complaint with fulfill of PA-DSS validation.
3 ways to certify that you are PCI compliant:
- Update your business payment system with latest PCI Security Standards requirements.
- Your shopping cart provider must be certificated by PA-DSS.
- Confirm that your payment application provider is PCI Compliant & correctly integrated with your online store.
Cyber-Criminal activity is rapidly growing on e-commerce businesses, so secure environment is mandatory for an e-commerce website to protect everything online from cyberattacks. Lots of possible options available to prevent website from such attacks and SSL Certificate (EV) and PCI compliance are one highly recommended.