The Evolution of E-Commerce amidst Rising Security Concerns

The many competitive advantages of ecommerce cannot be taken lightly. Offering online business and consumers alike a far improved productivity, significant reduction in costs, access and entry into a global business market, ability to provide a much improved customer service and streamlining business processes; are all reasons for brick and mortar businesses to open up their virtual shop.

Online shopping is a phenomenon that is growing rapidly, providing untold convenience and easy access to businesses and consumers alike; but the taint of unsafe credit card security and online fraud is steadily and adversely affecting their bottom line.

How can online business save their legitimate customers and themselves from this concern?

The Common Issues Experienced In Running an Online Business

One of the most common concerns that online retailers and merchants face is that they don’t know how to differentiate their legitimate customers from fraudulent users and hackers in real time. This concern follows with, not possessing an adequate security system that can help in detecting and minimizing online payment fraud, and lastly, not having an effective program that prevents unauthorized access to the data stored in a company’s network.

Potential Risks as an Online Business Operator

While there are many risks involved with the running of an online business, 3 major and potentially serious risks can sum up the entirety of this issue. These are:

Security Risk

Such risks are the cause of attacks from hackers and viruses and the severe of the damage incurred from the attack varies based on the type of attack such as; data loss, denial of service, stolen information etc.

Such attacks can bring a severe disruption to your business operations, which will automatically result in a drastic loss of customer confidence and your sales revenue.

Payment Risk

This issue normally occurs when the identity of the customer cannot be established or verified at the time of transactions taking place over the web. As a result, payment disputes significantly increase from genuine customers.

Although more commonly associated with customers paying over the internet via a credit card, other reasons may be; ordered goods not reaching the customer, a disagreement over the conversion rate, and finally, the goods and services being of the same quality as the customer’s expectations.

Fulfillment Risk

This term means delivering goods safely to the customer and can be either a digital product or a physical one. The risks that are related with the delivery in goods and services are; defective goods, a significant delay in delivery, and the goods delivered not matching with the description given etc.

Digital goods fulfillment is prone to risks as well. Performed through an electronic medium, it’s very much vulnerable to hijacking, mass duplication of copy-righted content and illegal manipulation and handling of information content.

How Can Online Business Operators Minimize These Risks?

As much as ecommerce helps online businesses, in order to save yourself and your customers from all these risks and more, business owners can adopt and implement a number of network security services and solutions that will help immensely.

Cloud Guardian, a managed web-hosting service provider has on offer cloud based security services which significantly improve efficiency of the business owner when it comes to quick and easy management of the services offered by the site. Moreover, the web application penetration service detects suspicious activity and deals with it before any damage is done.

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Magento Vulnerability - Check your web sites now

Magento platform is a popular eCommerce framework used by the organisation all over the world to create the Online shops.

The researchers from Check Point discovered the critical security issues, which could potently allow the remote compromise of a Magento based web site and gaining unauthorized access to the customer and credit card information. See the full post here: http://blog.checkpoint.com/2015/04/20/analyzing-magento-vulnerability/ . The vulnerability is currently affecting thousands of online stores. 

Technical Details

Three vulnerabilities were discovered by the Check Point team:

CVE-2015-1398 - An authentication bypass vulnerability was reported in Magento component. The vulnerability is due to a user controlled parameter affecting the login mechanism. A remote attacker can exploit this issue by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to a vulnerable system. Successful exploitation may allow the attacker to gain access to a target system.

CVE-2015-1397 - An SQL injection vulnerability has been reported in Magento component. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary SQL commands on the affected system.

CVE-2015-1399 - A remote file inclusion vulnerability has been reported in Magento component. The vulnerability is due to lack of sanitization for user-supplied data. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected system.

What should you do

Check your Magento implementation using our Trial Web Site Assessment Service  and see if you are vulnerable. If yes, apply the designated patch SUPEE-5344 released by Magento as soon as possible.