ABSTRACT
With the proliferation of Internet access and the shift to performing some brick-and-mortar transactions
online, the need for stability and reliability in the E-commerce arena is becoming increasingly apparent.
E*Trade, one of the many successful E-commerce sites, depends completely on its online presence to stay
in business. An outage, regardless of cause, can potentially cost millions of dollars. For example, consider
the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Yahoo! and CNN. Once a way to stop the attack
had been found, thousands of dollars were spent to facilitate the system cleanup, in addition to the lost
revenue. This chapter describes a methodology to assess the security and reliability of E-commerce. Based
on this author’s previous experiences with risk assessment, security, reliability, and Web “touch and
feel-ease of use” can be identified as critical to the ongoing success of E-commerce. The approach
described in this chapter can assist any E-commerce Web site owner, manager, or auditor in identifying
and securing some of these key risk areas.
