Introduction

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Commerce in the New Economy is generally referred to as e- commerce, where organisations sell their products and services online to consumers, businesses combine with other businesses to form virtual enterprises and suppliers link with partners in a supply chain. The driving force behind the New Economy is increased digitisation of data and information enabled by the Internet and associated technologies, such as the World Wide Web (Web). The Internet is as a non-hierarchical, democratically structured, collaborative arrangement entered into by millions of network users representing consumers, businesses and government.

Organisations practising e-commerce potentially have much to gain, but leave themselves open to attack and compromise which can have catastrophic consequences. New forms of crime are developing (e.g., denial of service) which have not been experienced before. These inherent insecurities require that stringent risk and security management practices be adopted. The consequences of someone meddling with the website can range from mild (e.g., the introduction of a detectable virus) to catastrophic (a prolonged system outage leading to the loss of customers and eventual bankruptcy).

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