E‐Commerce Security: The Birth of Technology, the Death of Common Sense?
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026009 |
| Pages | 79-89 |
| Author | Robin McCusker |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
Journal of Financial Crime — Vol. 9 No. 1
E-Commerce Security: The Birth of Technology,
the Death of Common Sense?
Robin McCusker
INTRODUCTION
Amidst the clamber to join the high-tech world of
e-commerce, companies have neglected to apply
common sense to their endeavours. It is arguably
the lack of common sense rather than the lack of
sophistication of e-commerce security which poten-
tially will scupper e-trade development.
As Erma Bombeck once remarked, 'it seems rather
incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated
communication, we often suffer from a shortage of
listeners.'1 Butler has argued that 'although business
was quick to recognise the advantages to be gained
from improving connections to the outside world,
a corresponding awareness of the unique vulner-
abilities of such enhanced connectivity has been far
slower to develop'.2 The lack of awareness can of
course be attributed to the unavoidable fact that
businesses' primary motivation is the creation of
profit. Estimates3 by the Gartner Group, for example,
that e-tailing will grow to account for between 5—7
per cent of total retail sales in North America by
2004 from the 1 per cent figure it represented in
1999 serve only to fuel corporate profit drives.
Analyst firm Forrester suggests4 that worldwide
Internet commerce will be worth $6,790bn (about
£4,620bn) by 2004. The bulk of trade is likely to
emerge from the USA, but, as Bennett notes,
'. . . [the USA's] dominance will decline as Eur-
opean and Asian—Pacific countries expand their
trading.'5 With the advent of m-commerce (see
below), even that large rise will arguably pale
into insignificance. Given such financial prospects,
corporations may perceive that the delay caused
by implementing e-commerce protection simply
reduces their potential profit margin.
SERVICE ATTACKS
That corporations lack the requisite awareness is
evidenced by the number of viral infections and the
effectiveness of denial of service attacks their systems
have been subject to. As Millar has noted recently,
denial of service attacks '. . . are the lead-lined cosh
of hacking . . .'6 Numbering some 4,000 a week,
such attacks have become, as Millar puts it, '. . . the
weapon of choice for malicious hackers intent on
inflicting most damage with the minimum of time
and effort.'7
The Internet provides the company with the means
to contact and do business with the whole world.
Butler maintains, however, that '. . . the downside
to this ability is that other people are equally capable
of reaching back into the company in the same
way'.8
In January 1999, one individual stole information on
more than 485,000 credit cards from an e-commerce
site.9 Some two weeks after that, data from 300,000
credit cards were stolen from the CD Universe
website.10 In February 2000, a number of major
e-commerce companies (including Amazon.com
and Yahoo!) were subject to sustained denial of
service attacks in which their websites were so inun-
dated for a number of hours with maliciously moti-
vated requests for data that the sites' servers
overloaded and could not deal with legitimate
requests for information. The Love Bug11 was
described12 as the most damaging and most wide-
spread virus outbreak ever. Indeed, losses sustained
in terms of lost work hours have been estimated to
be in the region of $10bn. The Love Bug was
opened as an innocuous-looking e-mail attachment.
The bug installed itself on the computers' hard
drives, replaced itself with a copy of itself and sent
infected e-mails to the addresses logged in the Out-
look Express folder. The fact that Microsoft Win-
dows runs on nine out of ten
computers13
made the
bug particularly powerful and points, at an early
juncture, to the lack of corporations' common sense
in placing all of their business eggs into one technolo-
gical basket.
Ironically, Apple computers, who have escaped the
majority of destructive virus attacks because they do
not operate using Windows software, are now
offering Microsoft compatible packages with their
products. Market competition seems to have over-
come their common sense-based logic and increased
their future vulnerability to viral attack.
Journal
oF
Financial Crime
Vol.
9, No.
1,
2001.
pp. 79-89
© Henry Stewart Publications
ISSN 135-0790
Page 79
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