E-commerce

The rise of credit and debit card use to make purchases and conduct banking activities has brought to the fore many concerns regarding their security. There have been numerous cases of private information lost, and the cases of fraud reported are rising every day. With such attacks on e-commerce in general and e-banking in particular, primarily targeting customers, conducting transactions using these technologies has become really hard for consumers, financial institutions and online shopping stores.

Of course, people are really worried about the privacy of their personal data and they are right to be. Internet crime is on the rise, and no matter what security measures are put in place there are still smarter crooks that use Trojan horses and other kinds of Spyware to retrieve personal information of e-banking clients for unscrupulous use (Chowdhury, Sejdini,  Xiaoming, 2005). When personal and private information is illegally acquired, it is used in crimes such as identity theft, credit card fraud and money laundering.

The root of the problem is that private information in debit and credit cards is stored in a readily retrievable magnetic band (Chowdhury, Sejdini,  Xiaoming, 2005). Even though chip and personal identification number (PIN) technologies managed to alleviate the insecurity of private information, the expansion of e-commerce to include mobile telephone and internet opened a lot of loopholes through which criminals and other unauthorized people can access this information (Chowdhury, Sejdini,  Xiaoming, 2005). When there has been a breach of privacy, safeguards and penalties are not enough. Individuals who orchestrate electronic crime should be dealt with severely. Governments, being the chief custodians of the people, should liaise with financial institutions to track down culprits of e-crime while still working on methods towards a more secure online transaction system.