Top Cyber Threats Facing E-Commerce Sites This Holiday Season

Delivering a superior customer experience is essential for any
e-commerce business. For those companies, there’s a lot at stake
this holiday season. According to Digital Commerce 360, nearly
$1.00 of every $4.00 spent on retail purchases during the 2022
holiday season will be spent online, resulting in $224 billion in
e-commerce sales. To ensure your e-commerce site is ready for the
holiday rush, it’s vital to ensure it is secure.

While safety and security are top priorities for businesses of
all sizes, it is essential for those who operate in the e-commerce
space. To deliver the experience customers crave, many websites
embed third-party solutions at every stage of the customer journey.
In fact, for certain e-commerce businesses, their suite of
third-party plugins is how they create and sustain a competitive
advantage.

Yet many e-commerce sites are inherently insecure and vulnerable
to attack due to their reliance on untrustworthy third-party
solutions. Consequently, client-side security^[1]
is a weak point for many e-commerce sites, allowing security
incidents to occur directly in the browser without the customer
realizing it.

Attackers can take advantage of security vulnerabilities on the
client side via e-skimming, formjacking, or cross-site scripting.
These attacks can compromise customer data, such as credit card
numbers, personal information, and login credentials. They can also
sometimes lead to financial loss for the e-commerce business and
potential regulatory compliance violations.

When an attack involves e-skimming^[2], cybercriminals insert
code to skim data from a page that processes a customer’s credit
card data. Since this attack occurs on the client side, e-commerce
businesses cannot observe the attack firsthand and react
quickly.

Many e-commerce sites rely heavily on forms to gather customer
data. Formjacking^[3]
inserts an attacker between the merchant, allowing the attacker to
access and record any data that a customer shares via a compromised
form.

Cross-site scripting^[4]
embeds malicious code on the client side. The code runs when a
customer visits the site, allowing the attacker to gather the
customer’s personal, financial, and session data.

The proliferation of insecure third-party apps and the inability
to observe an attack perpetrated via the client side provides
attackers with enticing targets to exploit. The fact that attackers
use security weaknesses in third-party plugins and not the
e-commerce site itself means little, if anything, to an individual
who is victimized. Since the attack took place via the website, for
most customers, the responsibility for securing the interaction
rests with the site owner.

To improve client-side security, e-commerce companies should
minimize their reliance on third-party code without impacting the
user experience. Deploying well-known third-party solutions with a
commitment to security can also help. And, as with every type of
software, plugins and apps should receive patches as soon as they
become available.

Additionally, simulating cyberattacks that target the e-commerce
company’s website can uncover potential attack vectors before
criminals can exploit them. Deploying additional layers of customer
authentication can add critical layers of security and make it
harder for an attacker to compromise a session.

Security software and
applications^[5] can also harden your
defenses and make it harder for attackers to use client-side
vulnerabilities to their advantage. These solutions can uncover
security flaws and quickly deploy security measures to mitigate
vulnerabilities. They can also detect attacks quickly and lessen a
company’s exposure to client-side security risks.

When security flaws exist, sophisticated criminals will
eventually find and exploit them at a date and time of their
choosing. The massive spike in e-commerce traffic during the
holiday season provides attackers with the perfect cover to use
these flaws in client-side security to steal personal and financial
data with impunity.

Customers expect e-commerce sites to protect their personal and
financial data. Client-side security is critical to delivering on
that commitment. Third-party plugins and applications form the
backbone of countless e-commerce sites. Given their prevalence,
it’s easy to overlook their inherent risks. Client-side attacks
take advantage of flaws and vulnerabilities, yet to the consumer,
the responsibility for security rests with the e-commerce site
itself.

Yet, when client-side attacks occur via third-party apps, online
merchants are often unaware of their flaws and cannot see when
attackers use them to their advantage. For many e-commerce
businesses, since the vulnerabilities are out of their direct line
of sight, they do not receive the attention they deserve.

Attackers aren’t so short-sighted. Where security flaws and
vulnerabilities exist, it’s often only a question of time before
they are exploited. E-commerce companies must take proactive steps
to understand and mitigate the risks of client-side security
vulnerabilities. Otherwise, attackers will continue to take
advantage of them, leading to a loss of customer trust and
confidence and the potential for financial losses and an increase
in regulatory oversight.

To learn what your client-side risk profile looks like, and how
you can mitigate those risks, visit www.feroot.com^[6]