The booming e-commerce industry, with its projected $5 trillion in sales by 2025, has become a prime target for cybercriminals, a fact highlighted in the new Trustwave SpiderLabs report, Retail Sector Deep Dive: Rise of E-Commerce Threats.
The report, a supplement to the just released 2024 Trustwave Risk Radar Report: Retail Sector, delves into the tactics attackers use to infiltrate e-commerce platforms, emphasizing the urgency for online retailers to strengthen their security posture and supplying much-needed steps organizations can take to mitigate the problems specific to e-commerce.
Unfortunately, threat actors have already done a great deal of damage.
In September 2024, Trustwave SpiderLabs found more than 3.4 million stolen user sessions, the majority from Amazon.com, Apple, and eBay, for sale on just one popular Dark Web marketplace — the Russian Market. These logs often contain customer personally identifiable information (PII), including payment card information, and pose a significant risk to the end user as the logs can give access to session cookies and login details, allowing them to bypass normal authentication mechanisms and gain instant access to personal accounts such as email, social media, and even banking or e-commerce platforms.
Methodologies used to attack general retailers are ported over and utilized against pure-play e-commerce organizations. The end result of these attacks is a massive issue for retailers that operate in the physical and cyber spaces, but worse for a pure-play online retailer as it could entirely shutter its operation.
The report noted that e-commerce sites need to protect against malicious actors attempting to exploit vulnerabilities via Magecart attacks and SQL injection attacks. Each attack method takes advantage of specific vulnerabilities, explained in the report, and is used to steal payment card information and the ability to gain access to databases.
E-commerce sites are also highly susceptible to third-party supplier attacks, and the report highlights how, in many cases, a single third-party provider works with thousands of clients. These risks highlight the critical role of cybersecurity best practices and online retail protection strategies for e-commerce businesses, as third-party breaches can cascade across platforms, potentially knocking retailers offline until the issue is resolved.
As it is everywhere, ransomware is a problem for e-commerce sites. Businesses in the retail and e-commerce space are popular ransomware attack targets as they have access to large volumes of personal and financial information from customers, which can be exfiltrated and deny an organization access to necessary systems to function.
For the full report, please download Retail Sector Deep Dive: Rise of E-Commerce Threats and Trustwave SpiderLabs second complementary report Retail Sector Deep Dive: Fraud Targeting Retailers to learn all the best practices for e-commerce security.