Herb Heskeths Weblog

This week I found an interesting article relating to e-commerce (not exactly relating to security but very interesting none the less) in the January edition of Computer World magazine. The article is as follows: ‘E-COMMERCE IS LAGGING IN New Zealand, says SLI Systems co-founder and chief executive Shaun Ryan.’ “Apart from Trade Me, there is not much happening. A lot of sites are just brochure ware.” ‘He notes that e-commerce is growing at 25% a year in the US and, in the UK is beginning to take off.’

I thought this article was very interesting so will include a reference of where I got it from:

Jackson, R (2008). NZ e-business still ‘brochureware’, says SLI chief. ComputerWorld, January 28, 2008. P 12. Published by Fairfax Business Media.

I have been searching this week for information about e-Commerce Security and found a really interesting pdf document called “Trends in e-Commerce Security Practices” a report by Brent Lahaise , Lise Jansen , Andrew Kissman , Kumar Mahadevan, Mike Saumure, E Wayne Boone and Joanne Reid. It discusses that e-Commerce has mainly dealt with validating  the  transaction points between A and B but one must also consider privacy (in the way of unsecured storage).  And then it goes on to talk about Biometrics but unfortunately it has not been fully tested so as of yet it still cannot be  used. So it has opened my eyes as to what lies ahead for e-Commerce security.

I found a very cool news website for E-Commerce hopefully it will help my research, the website can be found at:  http://www.ecommercetimes.com/. I had a quick look at the website and at this stage it seems very informative.

Found a couple of interesting IT security measures this week, firstly: Digital Signatures and Certificates, Secure Socket Layers, and SET (Secure Electronic Transaction). Not entirely sure as to how they work but will look at the website below for information this week: http://www.ecommerce-digest.com/ecommerce-security-issues.html.

I approached the tutor and told her my idea for the project proposal IT security in e-commerce, she said this was fine. And she gave me the suggestion of how some businesses just dont realise the importance of security with online e-commerce. This week I will look into the types of security measures available for e-commerce websites.