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March 06, 2009

Survey: Consumers Fear Online Credit Card Purchases

Most consumers lack confidence about making secure credit card purchases online, a Finland-based security-as-a-service provider through ISPs and mobile operators reported this week, following a survey.

Officials at F-Secure Corporation (News - Alert), which has U.S. offices in San Jose, California, say that while 50 percent of respondents were confident about their security when banking online, just 6 percent of respondents felt secure in making credit card purchases through the Web.

The survey – of Internet users aged 20 to 40 in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, India and Hong Kong – studied feelings of personal online security with regard to online banking, children’s safety while surfing the Web, and credit card information when shopping online.

“Phishing,” F-Secure reports, can appear in the form of what looks like an e-mail from a well-known bank, which in reality is a scam seeking personal information. On average, 54 percent of all respondents felt fairly or very confident that they would not fall for a phishing e-mail. However, 27 percent of respondents do not know whether or not they can spot phishing e-mails.

Not just consumers, but businesses also increasingly are at risk of cyber-attacks, as more and more sensitive information is transferred to electronic files.

As TMCnet reported in a recent interview with integrated application solutions provider Radware (News - Alert) Ltd., an increasingly popular standard for VoIP communications, known as session initiation protocol, or “SIP,” faces security threats of its own.

Ron Meyran, its product marketing manager of security, told TMCnet that VoIP, based on SIP, is exposed to IP based attacks that do not exist in the PSTN.

“There are SIP vulnerabilities,” Meyran told TMCnet. “SIP is a protocol that includes vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows, malformed SIP packets, SIP SQL injections. There are SIP service misuse – including SIP server scans to build a data base of SIP users registered to the service and then launch Spam over Internet Telephony (News - Alert), SIP brute force attacks, stealing the identity of legitimate users, and SIP Invite or Bye floods that can slow down or even shut down the SIP service.”

Officials at F-Secure say parents are increasingly worried about their children not being protected from unsuitable content including pornography and violent imagery. When asked the question,

According to Antti Reijonen, vice president of consumer business and marketing at F-Secure, parents simply do not know whether their children are safe or not.

“We will do all we can to develop services that support parents in keeping their children safe online,” Reijonen said. “There is also a lot of uncertainty in performing financial transactions, but it seems the basis for these sentiments is not necessarily founded on a good understanding of the real threats.”

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Michael Dinan is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Michael's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan

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