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THE future of e-commerce is being threatened by the difficulty of keeping it
secure. According to one company which recently had 50 000 credit card numbers
stolen from its server, Web merchants just can鈥檛 keep up with all the 鈥減atches鈥�
software manufacturers are churning out to make their products hacker-proof.

Eric Geiler, an executive with the Ontario-based ProMobility, says an
Internet thief hacked in via a security hole in its Microsoft Internet
Information Server software. Geiler says Microsoft had known about the hole for
nearly two years and had issued a patch, but small companies, including
e-commerce start-ups like his own, find it difficult to keep their systems
up-to-date. Sometimes you need as long as a week to write a single patch into
the software, he explains.

This time the hacker posted the credit card numbers on the Internet, together
with details such as the names and addresses of card holders, including Geiler
himself. 鈥淭his is a very large threat to e-commerce,鈥� says Geiler. Because
alerts are sent out so regularly it鈥檚 easy for hackers to exploit the holes, he
says. All they have to do is reverse engineer the patch to discover the
weakness.

Geiler says he is not trying to pass the buck. He recognises that companies
should take responsibility for their own security, but says software companies
ought to be bringing out 鈥渇inished鈥� products.

Bev Littlewood, director of the Centre for Software Reliability at City
University in London, agrees. He believes that the problem boils down to a
trade-off between cramming new functions into software and making it reliable.
All too often, he says, software companies ship out their product when it is
riddled with holes. In engineering terms this would be unacceptable, he says.
鈥淵ou simply couldn鈥檛 do this with an Audi engine.鈥�

Microsoft says it is fully committed to keeping its customers鈥� information
secure and to make sure that such issues are addressed promptly.