5 Cybersecurity Challenges for E-commerce

The rapid use of the internet has taken the e-commerce industry to all pin codes and doors possible. It’s now a few clicks away to view, shop, and review anything they want.

But at the same time, it’s not a first-choice shopping option and is limited to a few players, especially in low-tier cities and high-value orders. It’s still in its nascent stage. The main reason behind this is consumer trust, which, in the wake of evolving digital cybersecurity challenges, is a tough nut to crack.

Hence, mitigating some common challenges is essential for large-scale market penetration, profitability, scalability, and sustainability of emerging and existing businesses. Though large e-commerce players can afford dedicated security teams, it becomes difficult for SMEs to replicate the same and maintain cost and quality due to increasing business costs.

To bridge these gaps, we at Vinca Cyber are here to provide end-to-end managed cybersecurity services that will secure your digital footprint, essential for gaining user and consumer trust.

In this article, we will discuss e-commerce security challenges like financial fraud, E-Skimming, bad bots, Cross-Site Scripting, and Man in the Middle (MITM) and the ways and tools necessary to restrain these malicious cybersecurity challenges.

Cybersecurity Challenges

1. Financial frauds

According to an estimate, 40% of customers return from the checkout page just because it would take time to fill in payment details manually, impacting the shopping experience. To bridge these gaps, e-commerce companies introduced features to link card details, UPI ids, and wallets, which can cut down final transaction time from minutes to seconds.

However, growing expertise in card theft, forgery, UPI address cloning, return & refund, chargebacks, and false declines is a serious concern, particularly for emerging e-commerce companies.

To avoid such incidents, companies need to invest in security tools like AVS (Address Verification Service), IP address tracker, IPS, and others that are designed to stop bad actors from reaching the secure database where this information is stored.

2. E-Skimming

E-commerce businesses these days use social media ads and special coupon offers to navigate users to their websites and to checkout pages which has become a popular social media marketing strategy to attract potential customers.

But if a website's security is compromised, hackers infect such e-commerce sites with difficult-to-detect malicious codes, which can hijack consumer trust if found.

It is estimated that 3-skimming is growing at a rate of 10%, and hence it’s vital to mitigate the chance of e-skimming beforehand with security tools like vulnerability assessment tools, file-integrity monitors, configuration change detectors software, and other patching tools.

3. Bad bots

As businesses go digital, there is an unprecedented rise in competitions that rely on the negative play, such as bots that scrape websites and steal valuable data such as inventory, prices, best-selling products, and consumer demographics, which are then used to modify prices and develop counter-marketing strategies aimed at disrupting sales and revenue.

It is critical for businesses these days to continuously monitor websites with bot mitigation solutions that help websites get proactive security from any unknown bot injections, as this has become a serious question for business sustainability and innovation protection.

4. Cross-Site Scripting

With the rise in prepaid payment orders, hackers these days plan infectious JavaScript codes that are used to access customer cookies and bypass access controls to deploy large-scale payment or order fraud.

To avoid such incidents, security tools like Content Security Policy (CSP) have become a must-have for any in-house or outsourced IT teams to monitor websites' contents and prevent cross-site scripting attack incidents.

5. Man in The Middle (MITM)

Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks have become a common security issue in the e-commerce industry because an e-commerce website can have multiple visitors in a day who may have compromised networks that are lucrative targets for hackers to eavesdrop on their website activity and inject malicious code into a shopping website using multiple attack techniques such as sniffing, packet injection, session hijacking, and SSL stripping.

Hence, it’s important for companies, irrespective of website traffic, to deploy security mechanisms like WEP/WAP encryption of access points, router login verifiers, force HTTPS and public key-based authenticator tools to stay ahead of MITM attack incidents.

Conclusion

As the rise in smartphone use makes every pocket an internet hub, there is a lot of space for e-commerce companies to find their ideal customers, but as of present market dynamics, this has been limited to e-commerce players that have won customer trust by ensuring their websites or applications are free of any loopholes and vulnerabilities.

The path is pretty clear: mitigate cyber disasters and capitalise on core business strength and customer experience. And to avoid the obstacle of heavy in-house cybersecurity investment, we at Vinca Cyber are here to provide end-to-end, robust and agile managed cybersecurity services essential to secure digital success.

Are you ready to unlock massive e-commerce business opportunities? Park your security worries with us. To find out more, visit us at or contact us at.