Week 7 - Forum: Security and Encryption

Security and Encryption
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The 21st century has witnessed significant technological advancement in various fields especially e-commerce. E-commerce is transforming the world by making transactions easier, faster and efficient and promoting the luxury of not having to be inconvenienced by time or place. Although, with the luxury, e-commerce welcomes security threats such as identity theft, hacking on the consumers and e-commerce sites. Adequate security mechanisms are vital to mitigate e-commerce threats. In light to these, I found the topic of Security and Encryption in my program of study very effective.
The chapter cites that as of 2013 there were more than 1 billion internet consumers in the world making online theft a rather lucrative business in which hackers can thrive in. Identity theft and credit card fraud today are due to the systematic hacking and looting of corporate servers where data of millions of credit card information are stored. The chapter sees the central security issue in e-commerce as the difficulty in identifying customers' identity since there is no new technology to identify people with certainty CITATION Lau14 \l 1033 (Laudon & Traver , 2014). This scenario makes it easier for hackers to obtain valuable information. The authors in this chapter continue to affirm that most e-commerce sites also face threats of inside attacks from trusted employees who cause disruption of service, diversion of customer credit data and other sensitive information. These employees have easy access to this privileged information and due to the inadequate security as well as the lack of encrypted networks CITATION Lau14 \l 1033 (Laudon & Traver , 2014).
Cybercrime is a complex phenomenon that keeps on changing every time due to the constant technological advancement and improvement which makes it very challenging to curb. To that end, the chapter provides two part solution :( a) the need to encrypt channels of communication to ensure that sensitive information is secure. It will further help to protect data servers and customers fully from different forms of cyber-attacks. (b) The G...