E-commerce Security

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is the process of buying and selling services and commodities on the Internet (Turban, 2011). With billions of people now having access to the Internet, companies and organizations are using this platform to market their products. Many people are now buying goods through the Internet, as opposed to visiting shopping malls in order to make purchases. The service industry has particularly embraced this system. Brokerage companies and banks have made it easier to transfer funds online, pay debit and credit card bills, retrieve bank statements, apply for mortgages and have the approval online, and facilitate customers to buy and sell their shares upon financial guidance through the Internet.

With these systems and numerous transactions, there is the need for system protection. Individuals with malicious intent will be willing to corrupt online systems to their benefit and render the complete online transformation pointless. E-commerce security sole purpose is to develop software that will prevent any attack on these systems. The most frequently used vital security features are sensitive encryption data and the creation of passwords that are more than six characters long (Becker, 2008). E-commerce security has to take into consideration three vital things: integrity, confidentiality and availability. Security system developed should only allow authorized parties to access the protected information. The data sent should remain unaltered by the time the receiver accesses it to ensure the integrity. Security system should also be easily accessible for the authorized person to facilitate easy information retrieval, but it should remain inaccessible to other individuals.

In conclusion, a good E-commerce security system should have an authentication feature for identification, encryption feature for protecting sensitive data, an audit feature that keeps track of all operations undertaken. Also it is crucial for the system to support an authorization feature, which allows only the properly identified personnel to navigate and manipulate the system (Newman, 2010).