Security Priorities for B2B eCommerce and Enterprise Brands in 2021

(Photo : Security Priorities for B2B eCommerce and Enterprise Brands in 2021)

Last year was a chaotic one for many businesses, as the pandemic threw in an immediate need to work remotely and sell online. The crisis also changed how consumers interact with brands, forcing them to adapt to new selling strategies. While these changes were first felt in traditional B2C e-commerce, they've also led to massive e-commerce adoption in the B2B world.

As B2B businesses move online, the malicious actors, too, move with them. Since many are interacting with new processes for the first time, they risk overlooking suspect activities. Additionally, distractions due to uncertainty, surges or drops in demand, and new ways of doing things introduce new security challenges.

According to Forrester, digital channels will generate an estimated 17 percent of US B2B sales in 2021. Verizon also reports that eCommerce payment application attacks are overtaking physical POS breaches, and human error now accounts for more than half of reported breaches, making it a leading security concern for B2B retailers.

This can be further split into two major security risks:

Customer data theft

Customer data theft is devastating to any online seller's reputation. Attackers usually target customer data to steal personal information such as their credit cards to sell on the black market. These credentials can be used for more sophisticated attacks on brands or on other websites. Companies should invest into social engineering training, new security policies, and ensure encryption and alert tools are all up-to-date and patched.

Corporate data theft

Corporate espionage and data theft, particularly for large B2Bs, don't usually get much news coverage but are just as damaging as PII exposures. Intellectual property theft hurts an organization's competitive advantage, revenues and long-time viability. In the face of increased distractions, rands should prioritize security and increase IT support for remote workforces.

Thus, cybersecurity should be a top concern for those new to B2B eCommerce. The good news is that most of the work has already been done for them. Knowledge and awareness is power, so focus on keeping up with security trends, educating employees and putting new security policies in place that match your changed workplace environment.

To better protect your B2B e-commerce business from potential threats, learn to recognize and review possible lines of attack, and implement steps to avoid data breaches and minimize the spread of malware.

Recognize and review possible attack vectors

In today's environment, businesses face threats on many fronts, but awareness and quick actions are crucial to business and customer success. Understanding the paths of attack that result in breaches will help you monitor and protect your business against them more effectively.

Unprotected, vulnerable systems

Businesses moving online for the first time or scale up their digital selling channels face many risk factors. Smaller businesses may lack security expertise in-house and cope with reduced IT budgets. For example, hackers can break into poorly defended website infrastructure and place malware or exploit vulnerabilities in third-party tools. Significant differences exist between B2C and B2B breaches, too. While 99% of retail malware target customer data, password dumpers and app data captures that target proprietary data and make up 29% of manufacturing breaches.

Phishing and social engineering

Cybercriminals tend to follow users and launch attacks that exploit existing behaviors and habits. In Spring of 2020, phishing or business email compromise (BEC) attacks spiked by 600% as attackers lured in users to hand in logins and other credentials. 

Furthermore, BEC wire transfers have reached $80,000 in Q2 2020, up from $50,000 in Q1, and cause $26 billion of losses to businesses every year. These attacks usually involve infected websites with COVID-related domain names or email attachments with malicious Office documents.   

Individual actors

When it comes to data breaches, threats posed by insiders and rogue employers are third only to external actors and organized criminal groups. Security consultant CyberSecurity Insiders revealed that executives, administrators, privileged users, temporary workers and third parties tend to pose greatest risk. They can use their position to release malware, disclose confidential data, leak customer records for financial gain or to damage the company.

Application deployment errors

Many B2B eCommerce businesses utilize complex web, mobile, and API applications. Check these for vulnerabilities at every stage of development. Agile brands must allocate resources to properly identify threats with security instrumentation, automated penetration testing, and review their deployment processes for security flaws.

How to protect your business

1. Maintain sovereignty of your data.

Cloud services are extremely reliable and operate on the basis of a shared responsibility model, helping reduce the customer's burden of operating IT controls. Larger B2B sellers that would like greater control of their store-level data should consider moving to private cloud or on-premise environments. By choosing single-tenant over multi-tenant hosting architecture, brands eliminate numerous security risks posed by shared elements. Without additional access points, there's less risk of data inadvertently falling into a tenant's or attacker's hands.

2. Review access permissions, connections, and certificates.

Prepare to accommodate your remote workers ahead of time and only give them access to sections that align with their responsibilities. Preventative controls such as segregation of duties (SOD) strategically limit user access to sensitive tasks to eliminate the possibility of undesired activity. You can also install two-factor authentication on your systems, use complex passwords, and change them regularly. Up to date SSL certificates protect sensitive data through and improve customer trust in your brand.

Regularly educate employees on the latest security threats.

Train employees, not just your IT department, to be vigilant and informed to recognize security issues and enact a chain of command to report suspect activities. Aside from ensuring that everyone understands basic security principles, consider other proactive investments such as exercises and testing that reduces the likelihood of exposure to cyberattacks in general.

Use the latest testing, monitoring, and mitigation tools.

Ensure employees have access to the hardware, software, and monitoring tools. Keep the latest in security processes, and patches to guide teams to update, deploy, and use these systems. Stay up to date with PCI DSS certification and SOC 2 compliance, and adhere to various data privacy laws depending on where you do business.

Resources such as OWASP Top 10 and transformative cloud technology like "cloud-native" security, "zero-trust" design, and decentralized architecture can also help eCommerce brands address their security challenges.

Now's not the time to cut your security budget.

As we move into 2021, many brands remain cautiously optimistic about the future. Others remain in a survival mindset and are looking to cut operational expenses to stay afloat. The truth is, we are now more informed and better equipped to prevent cyberattacks than ever before. In the new year, B2B eCommerce brands should reist allocating funds away from security and ensure any digital transformation progress made in the year before does not fall by the wayside.