E-commerce is becoming increasingly popular. Digital platforms that make your life easier by allowing you to buy and sell products or services online, at any time and from anywhere. They include both physical and digital products and have electronic payment systems, online catalogues, delivery methods and so on. It stands to reason that they need your details for all of this so surely the average user has stopped to think about how secure it is when they get to the payment gateway.
Here, we tell you how to implement 2FA in your e-commerce to protect your customers’ data and increase their trust. We will introduce you to Latch and how it is the solution you are looking for.
What cyber-attacks can be avoided if you apply 2FA in your e-commerce?
Two-factor authentication (2FA) in e-commerce can reduce the likelihood of identity theft in online services.
Phishing attacks
The phishing attack works by tricking users into revealing their credentials, such as username and password, through fake websites or emails that mimic legitimate platforms.
2FA can help the user when he has fallen into the trap and revealed his password, because the attacker will not be able to access the service without having compromised the second authentication factor. This second factor could be among others a TOTP code. This adds an additional barrier that protects the account even if the login credentials have been compromised.
Brute force attacks
This occurs when cybercriminals try to guess your passwords by trying multiple attempts at automatically generated combinations until they find the correct password.
With 2FA, even if the attacker manages to crack the password, he will not be able to access the account without the second authentication factor. This makes the attack less likely to succeed if 2FA is activated.
Session hijacking attacks
In a session hijacking attack, cybercriminals exploit an active web session to impersonate the user and gain access to their account. If the cookie is stolen and does not have a 2FA, the attacker could authenticate on behalf of the user.
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Malware
There are different types of malwarebut one of them is aimed at logging keystrokes in order to steal the user’s login credentials.
With 2FA enabled, even if the keystroke representing the password is captured, a second factor would be required to gain access, drastically reducing the effectiveness of the attack.
Password reuse attacks
Password reuse attacks occur as a result of many people using the same passwords on different sites. If this happens, attackers could use these passwords to gain access to your e-commerce accounts.
However, by having 2FA enabled, the password alone is not enough, the second authentication factor is also required, which protects the account even if the credentials have been compromised.
How to implement 2FA in e-commerce?
The general workings of 2FA are straightforward:
- As a service, you will need to select which 2FA method best protects your users: there are different options, such as SMS, location or TOTPs.
- Integrate it into the platform: depending on the factor chosen to protect your users, there are often plugins or APIs available to facilitate integration.
- Think about the customer: the customer will have to give permissions or install an application in order to complete the authentication process and thus be more protected.
One of the services with which you can protect your e-commerce with 2FA is Latch, the innovative solution developed by TU. It is an authorisation control platform that protects your digital services by adding an extra layer of security. In addition to having the ability of the latches to authorise both access to the digital service and certain privileged transactions, you can also create TOTPs tokens and validate them programmatically where the seed is created by a quantum random number generator.
Your users will also be able to use Latch as an authenticator application where TOTP tokens can be retrieved from any device, as they are associated with a Latch account. We add more security than other applications by not showing the email address associated with the service and being able to manually request the display of the token, leaving a trail of logins.
