Case Studies in the E-commerce Industry

As the e-commerce industry became more significant in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic as a method of making sales and purchases, considerable increases in ransomware attacks were recorded. The nature of e-commerce itself makes the industry especially attractive for cybercriminals because of the need by both vendors and buyers to surrender information related to their personal and financial data [1]. Since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced most global retail commerce to go online, ransomware attacks have spiked across the board, with particular interest in larger, more lucrative companies. The surge in funding for cybersecurity in e-commerce firms between 2020 and 2021, as demonstrated by Figure 15-1, reflects the spike in ransomware and other forms of malware. E-commerce firms spent more than $21 billion in 2021, up from just $8.3 billion the previous year, demonstrating how much mitigating malware like ransomware attacks cost these firms and the industry.