According to Gartner, the continous flow of phishing attacks together with other well publicised security scandels has undermined the public’s faith in the security of E-Commerce. These results are based on a survey of 5000 US consumers and it seems that it will impact E-commerce growth by between one and three percent. Other points of note in the report are that 80% of those surveyed have less faith in E-mail from unknown parties and that 85% of those folks delete them without opening them.
Also see:
Informationweek
TheRegister
InternetNews
There are several things that can be done to try and stem the tide and shore up public trust. For one thing, commercial security packages could take a page from Open Source products like ClamAV which, when used on a mail server, will block known Phishing attacks (which are generally just text/HTML E-mails containing links) as well as the normal Viruses. Improvements in security need to be shouted from the roof tops and banks in particular, need to do more to advise their clients on the risks of online banking and what they can to reduce their exposure. For all the talk about big online companies having their data stolen, most of the problems actually appear to stem from actual uses falling victim to Phishing attacks, or Trojan/keyloggers/Spyware.
For the smaller developers in E-commerce fields, not storing sensitive customer data on publically accessable servers goes a long way to lessesing the potential exposure.
