Examining Inefficiencies and Consumer Uncertainty in E-Commerce

The popularity of e-commerce can be attributed to open (and mostly unbridled) competition with minimal barriers to entry. Yet, recent surveys suggest a general lack of consumer confidence in transacting online. Such findings are troubling — pointing to probable inefficiencies in e-commerce. The question then is: what are these inefficiencies and how do they prompt such consumer uncertainty? In answering the question, this paper surfaces three core e-commerce inefficiencies: seller anonymity, lack of product transparency, and lack of process transparency. It is also contended that consumer uncertainty is not an intrinsic buyer characteristic. Rather, it is contingent upon the information specificity of specific products that consumers transact in B2C and C2C e-commerce. Tying together threads from behavioral economics, this paper offers a novel perspective toward understanding electronic market inefficiencies and its consequent effects on consumer uncertainty. Apart from proposing a model of consumer uncertainty in e-commerce, the study offers a preliminary empirical validation of the proposed model. Findings suggest that inherent Ecommerce inefficiencies of anonymity and lack of product and process transparencies cause consumer uncertainty. The findings further evidence how buyer uncertainty increases when planning to buy products with high information specificity, especially when product transparency is lacking

Authorising m-commerce with location

Global fraud in 'cardholder not present' transactions over the World Wide Web continues to grow, in line with the ever-increasing numbers of transactions carried out over this medium. Unfortunately, at present the measures designed to combat against this fraud continue to require improvements to be made to limit the fraud. In this paper we will propose a series of indicators that financial service providers should consider in their attempts to limit fraudulent transactions. The indicators make use of prevalent technologies coupled with a need to place more power to limit fraud in the hands of the customer, especially given banks are continually moving responsibility onto the customer to protect their data.Whilst the banking sector uses a variety of measures for fraud detection at present there is only limited usage of device related indicators that customers could establish to limit the fraud on their account. For instance, whilst many users will have multiple devices the likelihood of a user performing a valued transaction on a device outside of that subset of devices is limited. Therefore, an indicator linked to device usage controlled by the customer may help to introduce further difficulties for the individual attempting to commit fraud. Similar indicators exist linked to device geo-location, service usage, time determinants and other aspects.This thesis demonstrates that users do not find device location services too complex to use. Indeed, providing user controls to enabled personalised security settings increase users trust levels. This research proposes security controls are embedded within users banking application. The effect of this approach increases users willingness to engage with location based security controls. Any initial privacy concerns are overcome as long as the proposed controls remain within the banking application

A Competent Approach for Type of Phishing Attack Detection Using Multi-Layer Neural Network

With the enlargement of contemporary technologies and the large-scale global computer networks web-attacks are escalating because of emergent curiosity of people and lawful institutions towards internet. Phishing is one of web-attack carried out by attacker using both social and technical engineering. Generally on web more attacks are launched every month with seek of crafting web addict to consider that they are contacting with a legalized entity for the intention of embezzle identity information, logon records and account details. The phishing attack detection and classification methods are utilized for the prevention and in-depth analysis of the attacks. In this paper, the proposed model has been designed with the multi-directional feature analysis along with the Back-Propagation Probabilistic neural network (BP-PNN) classification. The proposed model has performed better in the terms of the accuracy in all of the domains based upon the attack detection and classification

Trust on the Web: Some Web Science Research Challenges

Web Science is the interdisciplinary study of the World Wide Web as a first-order object in order to understand its relationship with the wider societies in which it is embedded, and in order to facilitate its future engineering as a beneficial object. In this paper, research issues and challenges relating to the vital topic of trust are reviewed, showing how the Web Science agenda requires trust to be addressed, and how addressing the challenges requires a range of disciplinary skills applied in an integrated manner

Towards a framework to promote the development of secure and usable online information security applications

The proliferation of the internet and associated online activities exposes users to numerous information security (InfoSec) threats. Such online activities attract a variety of online users who include novice computer users with no basic InfoSec awareness knowledge. Information systems that collect and use sensitive and confidential personal information of users need to provide reliable protection mechanisms to safeguard this information. Given the constant user involvement in these systems and the notion of users being the weakest link in the InfoSec chain, technical solutions alone are insufficient. The usability of online InfoSec systems can play an integral role in making sure that users use the applications effectively, thereby improving the overall security of the applications. The development of online InfoSec systems calls for addressing the InfoSec problem as a social problem, and such development must seek to find a balance between technical and social aspects. The research addressed the problem of usable security in online InfoSec applications by using an approach that enabled the consideration of both InfoSec and usability in viewing the system as a socio-technical system with technical and social sub-systems. Therefore, the research proposed a socio-technical framework that promotes the development of usable security for online information systems using online banking as a case study. Using a convergent mixed methods research (MMR) design, the research collected data from online banking users through a survey and obtained the views of online banking developers through unstructured interviews. The findings from the two research methods contributed to the selection of 12 usable security design principles proposed in the sociotechnical information security (STInfoSec) framework. The research contributed to online InfoSec systems theory by developing a validated STInfoSec framework that went through an evaluation process by seven field experts. Although intended for online banking, the framework can be applied to other similar online InfoSec applications, with minimum adaptation. The STInfoSec framework provides checklist items that allow for easy application during the development process. The checklist items can also be used to evaluate existing online banking websites to identify possible usable security problems.Computer ScienceD. Phil. (Computer Science

Risky business: managing electronic payments in the 21st Century

On June 20 and 21, 2005, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Electronic Funds Transfer Association (EFTA), hosted a day-and-a-half forum, “Risky Business: Managing Electronic Payments in the 21st Century.” The Center and EFTA invited participants from the financial services and processing sectors, law enforcement, academia, and policymakers to explore key topics associated with the challenge of effectively managing risk in a payments environment that is increasingly electronic. The meeting’s goal was to identify areas of potential risk and explore interindustry solutions. This paper provides highlights from the forum presentations and ensuing conversations.

A Survey on Phishing Website Detection Using Hadoop

Phishing is an activity carried out by phishers with the aim of stealing personal data of internet users such as user IDs, password, and banking account, that data will be used for their personal interests. Average internet user will be easily trapped by phishers due to the similarity of the websites they visit to the original websites. Because there are several attributes that must be considered, most of internet user finds it difficult to distinguish between an authentic website or not. There are many ways to detecting a phishing website, but the existing phishing website detection system is too time-consuming and very dependent on the database it has. In this research, the focus of Hadoop MapReduce is to quickly retrieve some of the attributes of a phishing website that has an important role in identifying a phishing website, and then informing to users whether the website is a phishing website or not

A Study of Scams and Frauds using Social Engineering in “The Kathmandu Valley” of Nepal

Social Engineering scams are common in Nepal. Coupled with inability of government to enforce policies over technology giants and large swaths of population that are uneducated, social engineering scams and frauds are a real issue. The purpose of the thesis is to find out the extent and impact of social engineering attacks in “The Kathmandu valley” of Nepal. The Kathmandu valley consists of 3 cities including the capital city of Nepal. To conduct the research, the newspaper “The Kathmandu Post” from the year 2019 to 2022 was downloaded and searched for keywords “scam” and “fraud”. After which the results were manually examined to separate news reports of social engineering attacks in Nepal and other countries. Also, a survey was conducted by visiting parks in the Kathmandu valley. A total of 149 people were interviewed to collect data by asking 21 questions regarding social engineering attack faced by the interviewee. Further, literature review of the research papers published related to social engineering and phishing was conducted. The main finding of the thesis was that public awareness program are effective reducing the extent and impact of social engineering attacks in Nepal. The survey suggests large percentage of population have become victims of social engineering attack attempts. More than 70 percent have received messages on WhatsApp regarding fake lottery wins

Understanding Internet Self-Efficacy in a Post-Adoption World: A Meta-Analysis

This study presents a conceptual and empirical review of Internet self-efficacy (ISE). It starts by conceptually reviewing ISE, its definitions, and dimensions. Second, it empirically meta-analyzes 213 studies, and aggregates results across 215 independent samples. The results suggest that ISE plays a key role in the adoption and use of Internet tools, how individuals utilize eCommerce, and how we train individuals. In addition, the results suggest that the type of system utilized and the culture in which the study takes place may affect the strength of the relationship between ISE and variables of interest to the researcher. The consistency of the findings also suggest that it is time for the field to move beyond studies that focus on adoption and use of the Internet and to tackle the more complex questions of how ISE may contribute to or mitigate issues such as political engagement, cyberbullying, and misinformation