There’s a serpent in the Garden of Eden! Even as enthusiasm builds up in the dot.com world, concerns about security issues are mounting. The recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have taken the security issue to a new height. It was, probably, the first time that such a large number of machines were used to disrupt services of several leading dot.com companies.India, thank fully, has not seen much activity on website intrusion. The simple reason being that the e-commerce industry in India is still in a nascent stage.
But as the stakes get higher so will the thrills of Web hacking. Soon Indian sites may find themselves in an unenviable position. Awareness of this possibility is, however, not reflected in the importance the new economy entrepreneurs are giving to security issues. While even a small e-commerce site in the US spends around a couple of million dollars on security hardware and software, Indian companies by comparison are spending pennies.
This could prove catastrophic even if the sites in India are struck with the relatively harmless DDoS type of attacks. Remember the attacks had effectively stalled big dot.coms like eBay, Yahoo and Amazon for hours together, despite these sites having installed multiple servers to be used as backup. Except perhaps the top Indian dot.com's, e-companies don't seem to realise the need for multiple servers. Nor is anybody (except for a couple of players) using encryption technology above 40 bit. This makes it easier for hackers to decrypt information databases once they get access to the systems.
There are other issues that are not moving at the pace they should. For instance, payment gateways are still a distant dream. Indian sites have not adopted any measure to prevent credit card frauds. The proposed cyber law has so many ambiguous provisions that in its present form, it could effectively kill the new economy.
Spending a few thousand dollars on security and thinking you are reasonably safe would be outright foolish.
There is nothing like reasonably safe security in the Internet world. One loophole and even a dumb hacker can play havoc. Either you have all the latest state-of-the-art security systems in place or you are totally insecure.