Essay : E-commerce and existing tools to protect against identity theft

As the use of electronic transactions over the internet increases, which impact the business, commerce, banking, industry, education and our life significantly, the demand for securing these transactions also increases. On the other hand, the attempts from other people to hijack these information and get illegal access to bank accounts, credit cards information, social security number or other information which are normally stored in computer databases, in the internet or in the proprietary networks of credit reference and make many crimes with them. Thus, the need for securing these transactions and guarantee its privacy became very important to stop the identity theft attacks on the internet which are threatening thousands of people in the e-commerce business.

Identity theft is defined as an illegal acquisition of personal information such as name, social security number, driver's license details, or bank/credit account numbers in order to engage in prohibited actions. It is also known as "phishing" and it is a fast growing crimes. They can make use of individual information to cause many crimes like transferring money, opining bank accounts, shopping with credit cards or any other unofficial use of critical information. Such attacks not only harm the individuals that are impacted but it is also impacting the companies and the banks by having access the critical information or deleting the transactions for logs. They can get more money as well by occurring access to the bank applications and perform monetary transactions from individual accounts which are also considered as frauds.

There are many techniques currently being used in order to protect from identity theft like passwords, virus detection applications, email spam filters, firewalls, data encryption and digital signatures. These techniques can be user separately or in conjunction in order to guarantee some level of security for the information or what is called security framework. It's concerned about protecting the user PC, information, communication channel and the company's servers. However, people should not relay on having these features in place and ignore personal protection for the information like using bank account details in a public PC.

In conclusion, identity theft is a major attack and it is costing millions of dollars every year and threatening thousands of individuals in the world. We have seen some of the techniques that can help protecting from identity theft but it can not help to protect from trusted identity theft. Hence, the success to the e-commerce website depends on the amount of security it has to protect the customers and their information.

Learn more about this author, Adel Alnakhli.
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