There are many security issues involved with e-commerce. Following is a brief list of potential hurdles or issues: 1. Back Doors and Trojan Horses 2. Viruses and Worms 3. Hackers 4. Active Contents, Active X 5. Eavesdropping & Password Attacks 6. IP Address Spoofing 7. DOS – Denial Of Service attack
1. Back Doors and Trojan Horses
These are software programs and they once they are installed or copied to a computer system, can open doors for further malicious, illegal or unauthorized actions. Trojan Horses apparently look harmless, however, they can be doing something dangerously wrong in the background. ‘Happy99.exe’ is a Trojan Horse that after displaying firework, sends its copies to email addresses found on the system. 2. Viruses And Worms These are also software programs. The difference between a virus and worm is that a virus propagates itself upon certain action by the user. But a worm doesn’t need any interaction to activate itself. ‘Love Bug’ is an example of a worm. It sends its copies to other email addresses, has the ability to damage the files on the target machine. This worm can also forward data from target machine to the attacker. It caused $9 billion loss worldwide. 3. Hackers These are the people who are behind all unauthorized access to other computer systems. They are also called crackers, someone who breaks in. They make software programs to intercept, steal or spy data from target machines. 4. Active Content, Active X Controls Web sites can host active X controls that can utilize various services on the target machine. Active Content is a term for embedded programs on web pages. Although they serve a good purpose and are very useful to perform various actions from web sites which inherently don’t have so much privileges and rights, however, hackers can still program such active X controls or embed