Top 5 E-Commerce Cybersecurity Trends You Need to Know

Cyberattacks on e-commerce sites are always a frequent phenomenon. Every e-commerce retailer wants to improve the consumer experience, but if they're not careful, their efforts could transform their business website into a playground for cybercriminals. Without a doubt, they are gold mines of personal and financial information for threat actors. And as a result, companies worldwide are losing billions to e-commerce fraud (more than 20$ billion in 2021).  

As e-commerce companies face a surge in online shopping—predominantly fueled by the global pandemic—it’s critical to be aware of the underlying risks. Online businesses must accelerate their digital transformation and acknowledge that cybersecurity has become a top priority for their existence. In such a scenario, keeping up with the latest cybersecurity trends is quite beneficial. 

Appknox mobile app security specialists have highlighted some of the hottest cybersecurity trends that will play a critical role in the E-commerce industry in our latest ebook series. In this blog, we will briefly cover some of the highlights from our ebook - “Top E-commerce Cybersecurity Trends for 2022.”

Rising Risks in the E-commerce Sector

Security issues in E-commerce can undermine online retail firms by revealing sensitive personal data, resulting in serious financial and reputational harm if they are not prioritized.

E-commerce enterprises are taking on new risks as they acquire ever-increasing customer data. They have custody of various financial and personal information, ranging from credit card information to consumers' addresses and birthdates, which they must preserve and keep safe from cybercriminals. 

Malware can potentially be targeted at mobile apps by hackers. If these applications—and the devices that host them—do not have sufficient authentication or data encryption measures, hackers can get unauthorized access to your company's important customer data or proprietary data with little effort. 

E-commerce businesses are also vulnerable to other cybersecurity threats. One of them is denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, automated bots that attempt to complete transactions using stolen credit card numbers, and e-skimming attacks, in which malware is installed on checkout pages to steal customers' personal information.

Another prominent risk worth mentioning here is the threat caused by frequent botnet attacks. According to a 12-month analysis by Imperva Research Labs of cybersecurity risks impacting e-commerce, 57% of all attacks recorded on e-commerce websites were carried out by bots in 2021, compared to 33% for all other industries.

Top 5 E-commerce Cybersecurity Trends

The extraordinary success seen by e-commerce firms in the aftermath of COVID-19 has undoubtedly fuelled the attractiveness of online shopping as a target for hackers.

In the future, new technological trends, changing customer buying behaviour, and complicated attack vectors will continue to destabilize cybersecurity in the e-commerce business. Let's take a closer look at some of the most crucial e-commerce security trends highlighted in our ebook:

1) New Payment Innovations

New payment innovations like contactless banking are a part of the trend toward the new era of e-commerce businesses. Recent research found that 56% of consumers globally say they’ve completed an online transaction on e-commerce apps using a type of payment that’s new to them. As the number of people using online retail would increase, so would the number of new-age banking transactions. 

In 2022, the e-commerce industry will likely continue to invest in modern data and analytics tools, artificial intelligence capabilities, and digital platforms as a direct response to consumers' rising reliance on new payment methods and banking solutions.

With the introduction of new payment trends such as mobile wallets, UPI, mobile payments, and contactless card payments, keeping transactions secure and verifying your clients' identities will become more vital than ever.

2) Adoption of AI for Fraud Detection

Advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are being developed by fintech companies such as MasterCard and Visa to predict and prevent financial fraud faced by e-commerce businesses and customers. The AI systems for fraud object detection examine business and customer data to rank client risk and indicate vulnerabilities depending on the findings. 

As more and more revolutionary technologies enter and disrupt the financial domain, AI can help secure the domain by analyzing huge volumes of data faster and detecting unauthorized usage.

3) Increased Reliability on Advanced Blockchain Systems

Blockchains quickly established themselves as highly decentralized and secure data flow technologies after their introduction to the finance world. In a link-node system, they offer additional security features such as storing critical data as cryptographic hashes. 

Hackers will have a difficult time breaking into the system since decrypting every node in the network is incredibly difficult. The nature of global finance necessitates the inclusion of these systems because they enable seamless and safe transactions, which is why they are likely to become a fintech industry standard in the near future.

4) E-skimming or Digital Skimming on the Rise

You have probably heard about skimming devices used to hack ATMs. Now the cybercriminals use a more sophisticated technique called e-skimming: they insert a skimming code in your e-commerce site, right into the pages processing the payment cards. Thus, they steal the card data in real-time, while the user is paying. The trend is expected to cover more ground going forward in 2022.

E-tailers and other businesses who sell products through e-commerce websites must assume that they are vulnerable to e-skimming. Fortunately, there are a number of actions that can be taken to reduce vulnerability by hardening security systems and e-commerce applications.

One of the first steps is to become fully compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is dedicated to decreasing credit card theft and fraud in both card-present and card-not-present environments.

5) Increase in Credential Stuffing Attacks

Credential stuffing attacks — in which hackers use credentials exposed in prior breaches to attack new sites — are soaring, with 193 billion documented incidents globally in 2020. The pandemic is a primary driver behind this increase; the abrupt shift to remote work, creation of new online accounts, and increased reliance on e-commerce all provided hackers with ample opportunity to attack sites and use these newly leaked credentials to victimize more organizations. 

One strategy for curtailing the success of credential stuffing attacks is deploying credential screening solutions to continuously check password integrity.

Final Thoughts

Cybercriminals will always have a special fondness for e-commerce enterprises. For would-be cybercriminals, they're gold mines of personal and financial data. And the cost of a data breach, both in terms of data loss and in terms of customer trust, can be devastating to businesses of all sizes.

In this never-ending game of cat and mouse, cyber attackers are constantly perfecting their skills and identifying new vulnerabilities to exploit while online retailers add increasingly inventive technologies to their sites to stay competitive. The best way to remain ahead of the game is to be knowledgeable about e-commerce security best practices and threat categories.

Top E-commerce Cybersecurity Trends for 2022, the recent Appknox ebook, presents a clear picture of the current cybersecurity landscape for e-commerce businesses, as well as what we can learn from some of the industry's most serious breaches. Being up to date on industry security trends will surely provide your company with an edge over threat actors and put you ahead of the competition.