Specifications

FIGURE 13.1
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 thou-
sands of times per minute, and, occasionally, they fail. Murphy’s Law would tell you that the
one that fails will be the most important one, long after you last made a backup.
E-commerce Security Issues
C
HAPTER 13
13
E-COMMERCE
SECURITY ISSUES
285
Source Destination
The Internet
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