Auditing the Electronic Commerce Environment

INTRODUCTION 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 upon 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 earlier this year. 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 article 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 article can assist any E-commerce Web site owner, manager, or auditor in identifying and securing some of these key risk areas.