It is usually thought that the individuals and businesses who adapt the concept of online trading or even shopping might be well off by now. Well, it is not that easy as can be seen. There are a few pain points and the risks that all businesses go through.

Moving further on the topic, if we need to understand about E-COMMERCE, we first need to understand the word COMMERCE. What the word COMMERCE means? COMMERCE refers to an exchange of goods/services for monetary returns; AH! Now what would E-COMMERCE refer to? E-COMMERCE is nothing but Commercial transactions done through any electronic medium.

While doing some research online, I noted that, year by year E-COMMERCE businesses are trending at losing up to $305 billion or even more possibly considering the frauds that go undetected. At an initial stage this figure to me looked exaggerated. However, in digging further into the fact files, I was forced to be convinced with these numbers.

Coming to learn this, made me find out the risks which almost each E-COMMERCE business development is facing in today’s fast paced technical digital world. This is vulnerable and it’s really a task to bring the following under control.

Let me just list a few risks involved in such businesses and I have tried to keep things as simple as I could to make you understand these:

1. Data breaches- Can be of any kind of data including Confidential and Important data breach.
2. Familiarity issues between buyers and sellers
3. Fraudulent Activities by fraudsters
4. Usage of stolen credit cards/online payment accounts for purchases leading to cyber theft.
5. Lying about goods/product not-delivered or being damaged. 
6. Phishing Activities
7. Engage in Hacking Activities for fun by taking any service or server down.
8. Risk of breach of contract with financial institutions, which leads to blocking of their accounts.
9. Server Hacking and downloading documents as paid.
10. One user when makes payment for the document and the other user instead gets the download link.
11. Buyers who make purchase claim that they have/had not ordered the goods/products and they get refunded partly or in full.
12. Usage of various codes in order to redirect the sellers and buyers to the websites with an intention to stealing the information.

WELL! not to mention, these are just a few from the bag that keep growing continuously in terms of various ways these hackers and the online thugs/thieves find their exploitative ways to manipulate the system. Therefore, it becomes a necessity for any business to spend on having a strong trusted solution provider that can help curb the hacking risks and also a housed team of trained professionals who are good at analysing the transactions with key identifiers or suitable indicators and flag it with an alert.

Despite more resources and investment being indulged into data security, phishing, data mining and plethora of other cybercriminals are still successfully stealing businesses and confidentiality of data.

A few examples to go with the justification for the current hack happenings around us can be seen as follows:

1. If we are to believe to RiskIQ’s Black Friday e-commerce Blacklist report, a group of hackers normally known as Magecart has minimum of 319,000 data breach instances to their credit in the year 2018.
2. Moreover, these JavaScript-sniffers (JS-sniffers) actually deploy a type of malware, that injects the websites with malicious JavaScript those are usually designed to steal customer’s PII and have been noticed skulking patiently with evil intentions on a number of hacked websites.
3. Furthermore, with the innovation and development of mobile phone experiences and numerous marketing features such as the chatbots, the threat too is accelerating. While businesses want to offer customers new ways to enhance their user experience, there are a million of other consumers using payment cards to buy online are in fact putting their data in precariousness.

The Dark Web- A Paradise for Hackers

To learn about what The Dark Web is and why is it known to be Hackers Paradise, we need to know where all the stolen data goes and how these Hackers benefit from the sales.

The Dark Web title is self-explanatory. It is a Marketplace for Stolen Data. The rise in the number of data thefts is patrolled, in huge chunks, by the Dark Web. 

Earlier, such criminals used to sell their stolen products through a network of some sheltered contacts. This unilluminated corner of the internet does much of the same task, but, is remarkably more dreadful.

Under the anomic aphasia by trading in cryptocurrencies, the dark web is the place where data is purchased and sales happen for a price. Often people confuse Dark web with the Deep web. The dark web is far different and more menace when referring to various criminal activities taking part in a non-indexed part of the web.

Data keeps varying in value on the dark web. For instance, according to cybercriminal shopping list by the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman), bank account details can be sold for anything starting from $4 to $25 – for being able to avail access to a variety of ecommerce development services for customer accounts including bank accounts to retail accounts. Also, personal information that is not easily changeable such as a credit card or bank accounts, is reportedly of more value to cybercriminals and in fact drives a huge hike in prices on the dark web.

Moreover, the dark web is not merely a place to purchase or sale stolen data; In addition, it promotes and enables cyberattacks by making it easy to avail hacking tools at a cheaper price to anyone and everyone who has a basic computer – this leads to be a big threat to the overall security throughout the web.

A research conducted in 2018 by (VPN) Virtual Private Network comparison service Top10VPN.com, stated how easily these fraudsters cold access various hacking tools over the Dark Web at a cost as cheap as a cup of coffee. For example, various entry-level hacking tools, such as ready to use phishing pages using a software to compromise most of the Wi-Fi networks and files to assist hackers hack passwords, all get sold for as less as $3.96 (£3.00) over the Dark Web. Moreover, the most comprehensive hacking toolkit could be bought for just $131.00 (£99.00).

Many acers believe the depths of the dark web are never ending, this means that the data owners will face more threats and evil consequences in near future if they did not come up with the correct measures in place to alleviate risks.

Preventive Measures to Stay Safe 

There are a number of preventive measures one can take to safeguard one’s data and system against the ongoing fraudulent practices:

1. HTTPS: In the case of a non-business website. Make sure you get a certified HTTPS connection. You may also assure that the HSTS connection is enabled.
2. Headers: Write codes to secure your website from Cross-site scripting, Cross site request forgery, clickjacking and from decryption of database password using mime attacks by deployment of X-FRAME Options, X-XSS, X-Forward Host options in your website.
3. Enable CSRF Protection by using CSRF enabled tokens.
4. Ensure that robots.txt does not disallow too much private information and also restricts the admin panels.
5. WAF: For apache and nginx, assure your systems Web Application Firewall is strong and helps not to leak server version along with any other kind of critical information.
6. When using any public service e-commerce platforms like WordPress , Joomla and Drupal, assure they have been updated with their latest available versions, to make sure your website is safe from being hacked.
7. In case of dynamic pages, check if all the ports are closed except the ones in use. If left open, ports are likely to leak access to root by escalating other privileges later.
8. Prevent SQL injection: On using database functions, assure your pages are secure from SQL injection even when some alien intruder tries to enter with using a fake code, your page should not crash, instead should land into an error query that leaks to the server-side code to disclose.
9. When using your own code, make sure you rename your web directories differently and not like your regular websites. Directory brute forcing forces to dump your directories allowing their leakage about critical data including user and admin credentials.
10. Implement Strong password policy protection and assure your password reset can’t be interrupted and changed using a man-in-the-middle attack.

Conclusion

Take right measures and assure your online house is safe from the online world out there. We all need to be extra cautious when sharing our personal data or confidential information over the internet. Our safety is in our own hands. Always remember ignorance always is not a bliss.

Hope this blog is informative and helpful. Feel free to Get in touch with us. Thank you for reading. 😊