Online Companies Forced to Improve Protection Methods
E-commerce sites are facing threats more than ever before from hackers, phishing scams, and other attacks. There are many suggestions being made on how to protect online shopping and banking such as the use of pictures and encryption. Experts say e-commerce firms must make a better effort to protect customer data. "The real issue is storage of credit card and personal data in back-end databases," says Bruce Schneier at Counterpane Internet Security. "That's how data are attacked." Encryption is being regarded as an important factor in e-commerce transaction security. There is a debate over how long customer information should be kept in a database. Schneier says merchants need to be made liable if they fail to protect consumer data. "Allow customers to sue them if they breach personal data," he says. Michael Gavin at Forrester Research suggests e-commerce firms should try using Web application firewalls to protect themselves from attacks. E-commerce firms are taking steps to stop phishing and other attacks by using authentication tokens that users must have to log into an account. The tokens can be obtained from banks and are becoming very popular in banking around the world.
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