HOW IMPORTANT THE SECURITY TOWARDS E-BUSINESS AND E-COMMERCE

As we understood, e-business and e-commerce is a business process that runs on the internet. The transactions is not limited to just buying and selling the products but also servicing customers and collaborating with business partners. This time, I would like to discuss further, how important the security towards e-business and e-commerce in the perspective of company view. A security plan is a very important to the company in order to protect their assets hardware, software or systems while doing e-business.

Our business daily transaction are exposing us increasingly with the  wider use of the internet to service our customers, coordinate and conduct transactions with our vendors and suppliers as well. The integrated systems used by the group’s connectivity sometimes create free entry of viruses while the attached file being downloaded and contributed to security threats and risks issues. Thus, security plays very important role, to protect our cyber businesses transaction.

What are the security threats to e-commerce business transaction that we should know and to understand?  The assets must be protected to ensure secure e-commerce, including client’s computer, communication channel, and web commerce server including any hardware attached to the servers.

Did you know what is Malicious codes ? The computer viruses as worms and Trojan horses are examples of malicious code. A Trojan horse is a program which performs useful functions, but performs an unexpected action as well. Virus is a code segment which replicates by attaching copies to existing executable. A worm is a program which replicates itself and causes execution of the new copy. These can create havoc on the client side.

The next security threat is a Communication channel threats; The internet serves as the electronic chain linking a consumer (client) to an e-commerce resource (commerce server). Messages on the internet travel a random path from a source node to a destination node. The message passes through a number of intermediate computers on the network before reaching the final destination. It is impossible to guarantee that every computer on the internet through which messages pass is safe, secure, and non-hostile.

Server threats

The server is the third link in the client-internet-server trio embodying the e-commerce path between the user and a commerce server. Servers have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by anyone determined to cause destruction or to illegally acquire information.

Database threats: E-commerce systems store user data and retrieve product information from databases connected to the web-server. Besides product information, databases connected to the web contain valuable and private information that could irreparably damage a company if it were disclosed or altered. Some databases store username/password pairs in a non-secure way. If someone obtains user authentication information, then he or she can masquerade as a legitimate database user and reveal private and costly information.

Password hacking: The simplest attack against a password-based system is to guess passwords. Guessing of passwords requires that access to the complement, the complementation functions, and the authentication functions be obtained. If none of these have changed by the time the password is guessed, then the attacker can use the password to access the system.

As the conclusions, by knowing the above threat in the e-commerce industry can be considered as our guideline. It is slowly initiative to addressing security issues on the internal networks where it is a very important to everybody as the owner of the websites, blog or other social network. Educating the user on the security issues in Malaysia is still less compare to with the number of users. We have to educate ourselves and our children to ‘behave’ while using the internet.

On the other hand, as the owner we should understand, how important the business to invest for strong firewall. The main tool businesses use to protect their internal network is the firewall, a hardware and software will help you, to protect the users.

User also need to that the virus as ILOVEYOU can be successfully penetrated firewalled networks. The others virus is Melissa, KAK and IROK. Be careful and do not be threat.


Source : http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2002/1435/07/14350193.pdf
             Business Driven Technology, Palge Baltzan, 3rd Ed, McGraw-Hill
             http://www.ijcaonline.org/volume21/number5/pxc3873400.pdf