Types of Threats among Ecommerce Systems

Possible Threats among Ecommerce Systems

1.    There may be risk to firm’s data, classified information and intellectual property through employees and other trading partners. Some firms do not have structures on how to control handling of sensitive by third parties or contract workers. Few organizations have systems that ensure common standards in human resource and provision of security mechanisms between partners.
2.    Hackers may exploit errors in application software, implementation or systems operation. In addition, there may be vulnerabilities in security mechanisms and operating systems which are now widely published and can be accesses by anyone to read or experiment with.
3.    Website defacement – Under certain circumstances, the corporate image or messages on the website may be changed through virus attacks thereby leading to commercial embarrassment and damage to the business image portrayed to its partners and the public.
4.    Denial-of-service attacks – This threat comprises of a flood of false messages aimed at crashing a business’ systems – can have an overwhelming impact upon a business, especially if it depends on its e-commerce system. The growth of the internet means that there are more possibilities of such an attack, especially with the anonymity one can adopt in the internet meaning that it is harder to trace attacker. Such attackers are increasingly using botnets – a group of computers infected with malevolent software and controlled remotely – to cause these attacks.