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How e-retailers can overcome IT threats?

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Overview

The total retail business of the e-commerce industry has been rising steadily during post-pandemic months. Both B2B and B2C segments of the e-commerce industries have observed almost double growth after WFH (Work from Home) became effective worldwide. Simultaneously, this has opened multiple doors of cyber risks. A recently India-based leading online food and grocery store suffered a massive data breach of more than 1 million of private customer details in an unfortunate incident. This has forced the victim to seek assistance from the cybercrime department to minimize the loss as much as possible. This incident prompted the other brands to boost their IT security policies and mechanisms to a satisfactory level.

 

 

Why is the risk increasing?

Cyber predators are sniffing treasures from the ecommerce industry during this new normal. While the entire globe is preferring to stay indoors and involved in virtual celebration, almost every individual is depending on online gifting for their nearer and dearer ones. To cash on this rare opportunity, the popular brands are adding extra inventories on their virtual shop to invite more footfalls. However, this boom has led cyber crooks to capitalize online IT security vulnerabilities There is a huge treasure trove hidden behind millions of user data, their personal details, financial details, payment transaction records etc. that are accumulated day in and out.

 

Identification and elimination of Insider risks

No organization would like to see their name in the cyber news headline due to wrong reasons. Most of the vulnerable areas of an e-commerce organization lie with the payment gateway systems and database management.

E-Retailers of course maintain a robust IT security. They have firewalls, IDS, Advanced Threat Detection and Response tools to keep malicious network traffic at bay.

Also, a mechanism to control Grant and Revoke access to elevated privileges (example MySQL Database) offers a policy-based access control.

 

However, it is definitely a herculean task to micromanage the user activities of the payment tracking team, database management team, promotional requirements/ marketing team every hour. And a lackadaisical IT security approach can surely result in data breach as unmonitored endpoints and end users pose significant IT threats.

Today identification of cyber threats has transformed into predictive approach rather than preventive measures. It requires monitoring of users’ behaviour patterns and reporting of the tasks performed. Today’s E-retailers require robust solutions such as ARCON Privileged Access Management and ARCON User Behavior Analytics

  • Vulnerabilities of Financial Records:

The entire e-retail industry is standing on EPS (E-commerce Payment Systems) to ensure smooth business operations. It authorizes the transfer of funds between buyers and sellers and allows the e-commerce portal to place a request for money from a customer’s bank against the products they have purchased. After a successful transaction, the merchant needs to keep a record of it because in case of refunds, the seller needs to return the amount to the same buyer. These transaction records are stored in highly critical systems which are accessed by users with elevated rights.

To ensure a secured and successful EPS system, end users with privileged rights require continuous monitoring to keep a track of who is accessing which account for what purpose and when. Ideally, malicious insiders are the biggest threat to organizations where access to critical systems is not happening on a “need-to-know” and “need-to-do” basis. Occasionally, (especially during festive hours) extra workforce is brought into action to manage over-burdened regular tasks and many are granted elevated rights temporarily. However, risk aggravates if the rights are not revoked even after the tasks are completed.

ARCON | PAM overcomes these challenges by allowing access only on a “need-to-know” and “need-to-do” basis. With the permission of the IT administrator, the user is granted access on a granular control basis including the now widely adopted method,   “Just-in-time Privilege” to restrict the duration of the activities. Moreover, the solution improves the overall access control mechanism through session monitoring and reporting.

ARCON | PAM solution helps e-retailers to continuously monitor all user activities including privileged tasks. A live dashboard displaying all user activities enables the admins to keep an eye on privileged sessions and identify malicious activities instantly.

  • Data Privacy

It is said that data security is the biggest hurdle in the growth of e-commerce. Why? In spite of having sophisticated network security solutions, organizations often fail to ensure legitimate traffic on the Web servers. As a result, they face multiple security threats. Programs that run on a server possess higher potential to malign databases, terminate server software or make unexpected changes in the information if those are malicious in nature. But equally threatening is anomalous end user behavior activities. Identification of risky behaviour profiles and detection of anomalous IT profiles is highly crucial to ensure data security. A stringent and relevant IT security policy can make sure that organization’s IT operations are safe and as per expectation. Poor or lackadaisical policies as to end points and end-users can never ensure a safe IT environment even if there are the best security technologies.

ARCON | UBA enables IT administrators to configure baseline activities on machines as per the centralized policy and identifies users who are deviating from the baseline policies. The advanced and unified enterprise data analytics identifies user-activities based on daily use cases and allows access only if the user has authorization or privileged entitlements.

  • Security of Critical Credentials:

From an individual user’s perspective, a strong password secures him/ her from breach of his/ her digital privacy. Furthermore, to strengthen the security, we keep on changing the passwords on regular intervals. Similarly, an e-retailer, at an enterprise scale, needs to secure the sensitive login credentials of all the elevated admin accounts (privileged accounts). Malicious actors might be in disguise among hundreds of insiders, third-party vendors or even business partners (in case of joint ventures) who are frequently logging into those systems for various tasks or purposes. The number of privileged accounts are piling on day by day with the expansion of IT infrastructure. Keeping the business model of the e-commerce industry in mind, even just adding a serviceable city in the list, widens the security gap if adequate measures are not taken by the organization.

ARCON | PAM with the help of a robust Password Vault engine helps organizations to frequently randomize and change passwords credentials automatically. It is hundred times more advantageous over manual control of critical passwords and holds the key to prevent any malefactor in the network periphery.

 

Conclusion

Every organization, especially in the ecommerce industry, is prioritizing privacy control and IT security infrastructure to ensure best secured services to the customers. Some stray IT and insider incidents put a big question mark on data privacy. The most advanced and best-in-class solutions like ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) and ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) can ensure data security and data integrity of E-Retailers.


ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.

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