E- Commerce has become one of the fastest domains in the world to function. The progression of technology and the web in tandem has led to the opening of countless ways to connect with the global consumer.
However, the higher the reach so are the more risks associated with it. And the same is the case for e-commerce industries.
We look at the statistics:
- According to research, the e-commerce industry experiences up to 30% of threats annually.
- In a tentative 90% of the cases, an external attacker can breach an organization’s network and can gain access to local network resources.
- In over 70% of companies, the main reasons for hackers intruding on their network are the use of simple passwords.
- Cyber-attacks especially in the year 2020-21 have increased by over 15%.
- Close to 50% of e-commerce companies report a cyber-attack of some sort.
- Cybercriminals can intrude over 90% of the company data. Once a cyber-criminal penetrates a company’s networks, it is extremely easy for him to steal valuable information and gain access to important information.
- Despite regular updates on anti-viruses, there is no guarantee it will protect your website from getting spammed.
With such alarming statistics, the time has come for organizations/ companies to up their protection plan to stop cyber-attacks. Though organizations all over the world are making an effort to combat security threats, it needs to be done in an extremely swift manner keeping up with the pace of digital transformation. Only increasing the budget and adopting advanced defenses will not do the job.
Having relevant solutions for relevant cyber threats will get the task done and reduce the dominance of cyber-attacks on organizations. One of the most common solutions is installing SSL certificate from reputed certificate authorities and their SSL certificates including Sectigo wildcard SSL certificate, GlobalSign SSL certificate. However, there are many cheap Wildcard SSL certificate providers that can help you in protecting the website from malicious attacks. However, this is not the only means of ensuring protection as there are different types of cyber-attacks which occur on e-commerce websites.
We look at the different types of cyber-attacks and the need for a skilled team in place to combat the security threats.
Phishing
One of the most common e-commerce security threats, phishing is a form of online impersonation and growing risk in the world of e-commerce security. The very act of phishing involves stealing credit card credentials and credit card numbers and using deceptive emails. These emails are disguised cleverly showing links from legitimate sources such as nationalized banks, government agencies, and big organizations. They normally contain fake links to the organizations wherein the link is to the login pages of a real website. When you enter your login data (password, username) the attackers can easily gain access to all your financial data.
In the world of e-commerce, a prospective buyer uses his credit card that frequently to purchase items and so, phishing is one of the most rising causes of cyber-attacks.
The remedy
Improving awareness and vigilance among the employers of your organization is one of the solutions for any kind of phishing attack. Phishing attacks specifically target individuals shopping on e-commerce websites, so this is one of the potential solutions to protect oneself. Another solution is a cyber team can run mock drills by sending fake emails to employees and if anybody responds to such emails the team can assist, guide, and make them aware of how to check for malicious emails to avoid future attacks.
False representation
This type of cyber-attacks occurs when cyber criminals try to change their digital information to camouflage their identity. In simple words when a malicious user arrives at an e-commerce website, it can make itself look like a potential customer with the use of false representation. In this way, they can access an entire website committing fraudulent activity.
The remedy
False representations are harder to detect for the common eye. In such cases, you need to train personnel to identify the false representations or disguised links from a possible cyber-attack.
General bot traffic
General Bot traffic is online traffic that is not generated by any human. It means that the traffic comes from some kind of automated script that is made to save the user the time of doing all the jobs manually.
These automated bots can perform tasks such as clicking on the links, downloading the images, or other tasks such as scraping or filling out the forms.
Now the thing to be vigilant about here is that there are good bots and bad bots. Good bots are generally search engine bots, monitoring bots, SEO crawlers, and Copyright Bots. These bots are trying to help you find relevant information.
But there are bad bots that can cause a lot of damage if they are let go. They are typically web scrapers, spam bots, DOS networks, and vulnerability scanners. All the above Bad bots look for valuable information such as website traffic, email address, and contact details; they also target a particular website or a server to bring them offline. They can also cause financial damage to sites that have stayed offline for a long time.
The remedy
If you want to check how bad bots affect your website traffic, then you need an expert who will identify the possible loopholes via Google Analytics. In Google Analytics one can see the essential site metrics, average time on the web page, the bounce rate, and the number of page views. If an assisted team can track this kind of data then it is easy to identify a bad bot attack on your website.
Social engineering
Social Engineering uses the same tactics as in the case of a phishing attack however it uses different means for any kind of impersonation tactics. The cyber attacker might use phone calls, social media messages, and any other means to contact employees.
After contacting these employees, the impersonators then manipulate the individuals by clicking on the links and stealing personal information. Social engineering is normally targeted to specific people (preferably those who are in the higher ranks) in an e-commerce business, though it is not the means and end of it.
The remedy
The solution is practically simple. You need to train your employees in finding out malicious links and reporting them immediately. E-commerce organizations also need to train their staff in identifying the potential threats that may emerge from different social media accounts and train them to identify any suspicious emails or messages. Companies also need to carry out regular security checks to clear any type of cyber-attacks in time.
Spam
The word spam is the most common as you normally get to see this regularly in your mailbox. However, there is another type of spam that is involved in cybercrime and that is different from your email spam. This normally happens when you leave any comments or feedback on the e-commerce site wherein the spammers may use these comments as a tool to leave behind dangerous links or sometimes flood your pages with fake ads. It is sending identical messages to thousands of recipients. Spam typically stands for any unwanted digital information
The remedy
Using anti-viruses and spam filtering tools will help identify and protect your e-commerce site from getting attacked for malicious information. An SSL certificate is always a good idea as it not only protects your primary domains but also protects your other listed sub-domains. It also has the option of protecting an unlimited amount of sub-domains, i.e. (your login domain, mail domain, and search domain)
Click hijacking
As the name suggests, this type of hijacking is the one that takes place when the user unintentionally clicks on malicious links. Cybercriminals can set up a fake call-to-action button that seemingly looks legitimate. When clicking on the link malicious data gets downloaded automatically. This type of downloaded data is an easy way of stealing information. The downside of this type of clicking is the hackers make the pop-up look or a call to action button look extremely legitimate.
The remedy
E-commerce website owners should train their staff to inspect that all the advertisements and pop-ups on the sites are from legitimate sources. If any organization is working with any affiliate business they should ensure what time of advertisers they will allow.
Cyber-attacks as mentioned above can take many forms. The first step is educating oneself and having in place basic protection measures such as installing anti-virus. It is also one of the fastest and easy ways to secure your domain at the same time any unlimited domains for your e-commerce website.
Having a skilled team to combat any kind of online security threat is one of the purposeful approaches to preventing cyber intrusion. Properly training employees for the right monitoring of activities will ensure better inspection of the website. Lack of awareness and ignorance is the root cause of the rise in cyber-attacks.
