E-commerce Security Issues CHAPTER 13 285 Source The Internet Destination FIGURE Transmitting information via the Internet sends your information via a number of potentially untrustworthy hosts. To see the path that data takes from you to a particular machine, you can use the command traceroute (on a UNIX machine). This command will give you the addresses of the machines that your data passes through to reach that host. For a host in your own country, data is likely to pass through 10 different machines. For an international machine, there can be more than 20 intermediaries. If your organization has a large and complex network, your. | E-commerce Security Issues 285 Chapter 13 The Internet Figure Transmitting information via the Internet sends your information via a number of potentially untrustworthy hosts. To see the path that data takes from you to a particular machine you can use the command traceroute on a UNIX machine . This command will give you the addresses of the machines that your data passes through to reach that host. For a host in your own country data is likely to pass through 10 different machines. For an international machine there can be more than 20 intermediaries. If your organization has a large and complex network your data might pass through five machines before it even leaves the building. To protect confidential information you can encrypt it before it is sent across a network and decrypt it at the other end. Web servers often use Secure Socket Layer SSL developed by Netscape to accomplish this as data travels between Web servers and browsers. This is a fairly low-cost low-effort way of securing transmissions but because your server needs to encrypt and decrypt data rather than simply sending and receiving it the number of visitors-per-second that a machine can serve drops dramatically. Loss or Destruction of Data It can be more costly for you to lose data than to have it revealed. If you have spent months building up your site as well as gathering user data and orders how much would it cost you in time reputation and dollars to lose all that information If you had no backups of any of your data you would need to rewrite the Web site in a hurry and start from scratch. It is possible that crackers will break into your system and format your hard drive. It is fairly likely that a careless programmer or administrator will delete something by accident and it is almost certain that you will occasionally lose a hard disk drive. Hard disk drives rotate thousands of times per minute and occasionally they fail. Murphy s Law would tell you that the one that fails will be the .
