ABSTRACT
With the proliferation of Internet access and the shift to performing some brick-andmortar 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.
