5 Key E-Commerce Holiday Shopping Cyberattacks to Secure, Defend, and Protect Against

This will be a historic e-commerce holiday shopping season because of the ways we've seen digital transformation accelerate at an unprecedented rate. Similarly, many strategic initiatives such as consumer services, customer loyalty, and brand recognition that are now predominantly online. Because of this, they’re now increasingly being hijacked by fraudsters implementing account takeover schemes, which ultimately leads to fraud losses and damaged brands. Any business that operates e-commerce applications or manages online user accounts is a prime target. Especially during the holiday shopping season, cybercriminals know that with increased transactions comes increased vulnerabilities and opportunity.

As Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the anticipated holiday season approach, coupled with an inventory supply chain crisis, 2021 e-commerce holiday sales are expected to surge upwards to $859 billion. Many merchants depend on making most of their annual revenue then, so it’s critical to have sites running smoothly and open for business for legitimate customers. Companies need to defend, secure, and protect their business from cybercriminals, and ensure they have properly prepared their e-commerce sites for the holidays and beyond to deliver a flawless digital customer experience.

Retailers are exposed to many types of fraud, including account takeover, gift card cracking, content scraping, inventory hoarding, and card fraud.

Over 1 million stolen credentials are reported every day, and underground markets have industrialised cyber crimes and fraudulent activities. Automation, malicious bots, and manual attacks expose users and businesses to fraud, which led to a 65% increase in successful fraud attempts from 2019 to 2020.

Companies must be prepared to defeat modern cyberattacks and protect their e-commerce business to ensure a seamless and secure user journey to checkout. Accordingly, organizations should connect their security and fraud solutions and teams to provide real-time monitoring and intelligence that mitigate both human and automated fraud before it impacts the business—without disrupting the customer experience. These strategies must also be designed to demotivate attackers all the way through the buyers’ journey. And, of course, companies have to know what to watch for.

5 Most Dangerous E-Commerce Threats

1.   Account Takeover

Testing of large numbers of compromised credentials (i.e., usernames and passwords breached from another site) by attackers against your login application to compromise those accounts for monetary gain.

2.   Gift Card Cracking

A type of brute force attack in which attackers check millions of gift card number variations on a gift card application to identify card numbers that hold value.

3.   Content Scraping

The use of automated tools to collect large amounts of data from a target application in order to reuse or sell that data elsewhere.

4. Inventory Hoarding

Acquisition of goods or services by abusing the application in a manner that a normal user would be unable to undertake manually, eroding customer trust.

5.   Carding Fraud

Automated abuse of checkout pages to identify missing values of credit card data like expiration date or card security codes.

Now, retailers can solve these 5 key e-commerce security threats, without increasing friction, by adapting new security measures that can improve business outcomes and prevent fraud.

A busy holiday season lies ahead, and F5 can offer compelling e-commerce security advantages to help organizations provide a secure and safe customer experience. Learn more how F5 can help you secure, defend, and protect your e-commerce business with the protection you can trust, because security starts here!