Essay: Literature review: Online security in e-commerce

The objective of this document is to discuss the issue of online security on e-commerce. The main focus will be on the holes found in online information sharing and security. There are many things to be considered while talking about the online information security as it holds the future of the online world. Provides a discussion on policy formulation at international and national level, to trust building as a key to online security, to specific technical processes that might help thwart breaches of this security. Despite the frequent warnings about online security to be found in the media, many of us unthinkingly embrace the online-mediated environment – it is quick, simple… and dangerous. On the one hand we as consumers of online services seem somewhat accepting of the internet’s insecurity; on the other hand businesses engaged in e-commerce are increasingly worried about possible security breaches.
In this era of technology, there has been an incredible growth in the e-commerce and many ethical issues have been emerged while reviewing it. Security concerns, Web sites that do not carry an advertising label, cyber squatters, spamming, online marketing to children, conflicts of interest, manufacturers competing with intermediaries online are discussed in this research(Stead, Bette Ann, 2001). This research shows that the power of the Internet to the spotlight issues can be viewed as a significant force in providing a kind of self-regulation that supports an ethical e-commerce environment.
While going through another research on Online Information Review (Gorman, 2007), the problem of breaches in online information sharing and security are discussed. There are so many issues that have to be considered when addressing the matter of online information security which is so important when comes to the future stability of the online world. It provides a discussion on policy formulation at international and national level, to trust building as a key to online security, to specific technical processes that might help thwart breaches of this security.There have been many examples of “identity theft” using information provided online by individuals – birthdates, driving license numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Equally, there are many scams aimed at leaching funds from personal bank accounts of people who do internet banking, and we are all familiar with the epidemic of attempted bank frauds based in Nigeria. And these are only two common examples of what is happening.
However, the institutional or commercial sector, as the banking example above suggests, is far less laid-back about online security issues, and have been working on ways to protect their own and their customers’ interests for some time.Hackers’ targets aren’t limited to big banks or major online retailers. City and county governments – even smaller ones – are equally vulnerable. There are people who earn a living trolling for systems that have poor architecture or haven’t been sufficiently hardened. Their goal is to find vulnerable sites where they can slip in and steal private data, regardless of the organization’s size.
Some payment processing systems authorize and “batch” transactions on a server until day’s end, when the batch is cleared for transmission to the merchant service provider for settlement. Ideally, government agencies should process transactions for settlement in real time and never store card information anywhere on the system or network. At a minimum, batched transactions should be encrypted and isolated from the rest of the network to prevent leaving them open to unauthorized disclosure.
For profit-making sources of digital speech, information and amusement, the major risk posed by the Internet is not the threat of piracy, but the threat created by free speech that does not charge any cash. Free speech has the possibility to grasp out costly speech. A glut of good quality free material has the ability to run organizations in the business of marketing speech out of business (Litman, Jessica, 1999). We havenot had to be anxious about this earlier, because speaking in an effective way to a big audience was costly, and addressees could not afford to do important mass speaking for free for a long time. The Internet has made it much cost effective. It doesnot take a lot to provide information to the entire world, every day, for free, for years. And people do. If we try to boost the abundant broadcasting of information, free speech is too good. If we try to increase commerce in information, free speech is debatably not good, in that it fight with pay speech. Data merchants would clearly favor that the only speech in marketplace be the pay speech. In last two years, commercial content holders have made major development in herding free narrators off the Net. There is a significant synergy among influencing the government to provide your business some sociable new rulesand regulations, and using new as well as old legal tools to build life more hard or costly for problematic opponents who arenot necessarily doing anything against the law. Newly, businesses have been capable to join the two policies to build the Internet a much secure place to market speech, by reducing the friendliness of the Internet, more unsafe place to provide speech at no cost.
Developing safety actions often occupies trade-offs among various kinds of purposes. Different stakeholders may have differentrequirements and may have dissimilar ideas on resolving the resulting design conflicts (Burgemeestre, Brigitte, 2013). This paper reports on an application of value-sensitive design. Based on argumentation theory and social values, the paper develops a structured approach for discussing design conflicts, called value-based argumentation. The application domain examined in the paper is concerned with physical safety and security issues that arise in cross-border shipments. We first identify the kinds of dialogues that take place in this domain, in particular, audit dialogues to determine whether security measures comply with regulations. Based on argumentation theory we develop a formal language and a diagramming approach intended to facilitate parties in identifying, discussing and reaching agreement about security risks and corresponding mitigation measures. Trade-offs can be dealt with by making underlying values explicit. Using a stylized example, the approach was successfully taught to practitioners working with EU customs regulations. Practitioners generally found the approach helpful, in particular to bring out implicit underlying motivations. We conclude by discussing how our approach can be generalized to other kinds of dialogues involving design conflicts.
Nationwide surveys were conducted to capture the perceptions of accounting educators and practitioners with respect to the security issues of e-commerce payment systems and e-business curriculum issues. Responses to the questions about the security of e-commerce payment systems revealed that both educators and practitioners were most concerned that personal information may to be sold to others, causing them to end up on undesired mailing lists. Survey respondents also worry about virus attacks and misuse or theft of personal information and credit card numbers. T-test results, which were significant at the 5% level, suggest that practitioners are more concerned than educators about virus attacks, their personal information being sold to other firms, their personal information or credit card information being intercepted, and their personal information or credit information being compromised by hackers.
The skills and knowledge responses revealed that the majority of educators and practitioners believe that the growth in e-commerce means that accounting graduates need more general knowledge, more AIS/technology skills, more organizational and business knowledge, and 150 hours or more of education. The majority of practitioners also believe that accounting graduates should possess better intellectual skills. T-tests for differences in mean perceptions between educators and practitioners showed that practitioners have stronger feelings than educators about the importance of communication and interpersonal skills as well as accounting knowledge, accounting skills and integrity/leaderships skills. These results suggest a few potential areas of exploration with respect to accounting and business curriculum changes. Specifically, the results suggest a need to strengthen the technology and critical thinking skills of all students. These results also suggest that accounting educators and practitioners share the same concerns as many other e-commerce consumers today with respect to the security of personal information which is used to facilitate e-commerce transactions.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, more than 8 million people have had unauthorized use of their bank or credit card account numbers or had accounts illegally opened in their names (Ericksen, Baye, 2010). First and foremost is the password, it’s a good idea to periodically check in with them to make sure there haven’t been any unauthorized transactions affecting your credit rating.
Governments often leave individual agencies the flexibility to contract with payment providers, risking that some will choose providers that aren’t appropriately secure. To avoid a fragmented, agency-by-agency approach to security, governments should take an enterprise approach. A single provider can implement security best practices across all departments. Developers who write test logs often use lines of code that are required to capture credit card data. Later, when the system or application moves from test into production, the developer must remove that code configuration to prevent the application from continuing to write credit card numbers to the log files, where it would be unprotected. Beyond log files, placing adequate controls around e-commerce applications can limit your exposure to cyber-crimes. For example, consider creating a common checkout module that has been tested and scanned. All developers then should use this standard set of checkout pages. This step restricts developers from making code modifications that would introduce non-PCI-compliant checkout screens into the online transaction process.
The researcher has gone through several literatures that have been already in market regarding cyber security and e-commerce. From those, researcher came to know that, the Corporations should recognize that these unwanted threats to their online businesses have planned implications to their upcoming business growth and take correct actions to make sure that these threats are eliminated or considerably abridged so that user self-assurance in the Internet as an option means of shopping is maintained(Smith, Alan, 2004). These oppose measures, coined as cyber safety, have been created to guarantee the security of customer privacy and data and permit for an untroubled shopping practice. There is requirement for the improvement of models that will allow corporations to learn the effects of cyber-crime on online customer confidence and to oppose through leveraging the profit linked with the most modern upgrading in cyber security. With these two faces of e-commerce impacting the customer, corporations have to ensure that the security actions taken will finally triumph to guarantee that user will continue to use the Internet to fulfill their shopping requirements.
The question arises, then, as to what factors actually affect the formation of trust in online environments, a question tackled by Salo and Karjaluoto in their attempt to create a conceptual framework or model that categorizes both external and internal elements affecting the formation of trust among users. This integrative trust model may well be something that e-commerce entities (including government and education) can apply in their quest for client buy-in to e-services.
But of course security and attitudes towards security have multiple focal points, and it would be unfair to focus on the consumer/client aspect to the exclusion of other stakeholders. Thus McFadzean et al. offer a corrective by investigating how organizational directors and boards perceive information security and how this perception influences the development of their information security strategy. Directors are often neglected in studies of online security, yet it seems only natural that their attitudes substantially determine how their organizations respond to online security.
Conclusion
To summarize, the evidence shows a strong link between online shopping and the cybercrime on e-commerce. It is an issue not only for financial institutions and e-commerce, but also for e-government, educational institutions and individuals at all levels. Underpinning the success of the internet is the confidence of hundreds of millions of individual users across the globe. But there is a growing perception, fuelled by media reports, that the internet is insecure and unsafe. Just take a look at your own online behavior – who has not engaged in online banking, ordered books and music from Amazon.com, supplied credit card numbers via email, sent book manuscripts by email, and so on? When this is set against the rate of change and innovation, and the difficulty of keeping pace with the latest technology, the risk to public confidence is clear.
The above mentioned authors have covered almost all parts of the things related to business cyber-crime, but there are some niches that they were not able to cover. To identify those targets and find out a solution for those problems are the main challenges in this dissertation. The researcher has found that these authors haven’t covered the comparison of several e-commerce websites and the researcher get into a conclusion that, it has provided a good research gap for his area of research. This dissertation will critically analyze the issues associated with cybercrime on E-Commerce by the comparing different E-commerce websites. This relates the problems for law enforcement agencies in tackling this rising problem. While going through the above literatures, the researcher found that before these issues can be addressed, it is essential to grasp some fundamental background concepts. One among them is that the Corporations should realize that these threats to their online businesses have strategic implications to their business future and take proper measures to ensure that these threats are eliminated or significantly reduced so that consumer confidence in the Internet as an alternative means of shopping is maintained. The counter measures, coined as cyber security, have been developed to ensure the safety of consumer privacy and information and allow for a carefree shopping experience. With these two facets of e-commerce impacting the online consumer, corporations must ensure that the security measures taken will ultimately prevail to assure that consumers will continue to use the Internet to satisfy their shopping needs. On this basis, the following research methodology is designed to address the objectives of the study.