Hacker Safe States 75% Of eCommerce Is Not Truly Secure

A rather in depth interview and analysis from Hacker Safe showed up on my blog radar this morning that I thought deserved a mention on our blog as well. According to Hacker Safe CEO, Ken Leonard, 75% of eCommerce sites are not secure or do not take security into consideration when launching their eCommerce sites.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, author of RKGblog, posted an interview he conducted with Ken that had some interesting and informative answers to Alan’s questions.

Here’s the questions Alan asked, to see Ken’s answers, simply read the whole post on RKGblog:

For folks not familiar with ScanAlert, can you give us a thumbnail of what you do?
What are the origins of the firm?
I’m a tech geek. Can you go into more engineering detail about the various scans you run, how often, and what you are looking for, and so on?
You mentioned application level exploits like SQL injection. Are there certain classes of vulnerabilities that your scans can’t see?
What should retailers be doing about the threats you’ve described?
When you take on a new client, what are the odds they fail their initial scan?
Three out of four sites fail the first scan to some degree – that’s a sobering statistic. So most online retailers, unless they’re actively working on security, probably face vulnerabilities. What do they do next?
What is your business model? How do you charge?
Can you name some clients?
Retailers say they worry putting a security badge on their site might harm conversion two ways – one, even mentioning the word “hacker” could introduce doubt in shoppers who had not been thinking security, and two, the hackers might see the badge as a challenge, and increase their efforts to harm the site. Thoughts?
Those are hefty conversion increases. Do you have data on these?
You are starting to partner with the feed engines. Can you tell us about that?
Let’s return to web security in general. In your experience, how important should this issue be for online retailers?
And yet from monitoring buzz in the trades and at the shows, site security is usually a marginal issue.
Are the online retailers with better security apt to be the smaller folks, or the larger companies?
Suppose the CEO of a mid-sized online retailer asked you for a five minute summary of the web site security issue. What would you say?

For those of you who do not take security into account when launching an new or existing eCommerce site, you should! It is proving to be a much larger factor for customers and merchants are quickly finding that without proper security badges, certificates and secure payment areas, that it is harder to get sales and takes longer to climb the ladder of success. Plus, there are companies like ScanAlert and Hacker Safe that preach how important it is, basically paving the way of the future and creating a huge following at the same time. There is a ton of valuable information and insight in the Ken’s answers, bravo Alan on putting together such a well written, well crafted, well executed post.

A few posts we have recently done on ScanAlert/Hacker Safe CSE Parterships: