Published in News

E-commerce sites not protecting users

by on12 March 2014



Letting them use dumb passwords

Top e-commerce sites in the UK are not doing enough to stop users coming up with dumb passwords, a report has found. Two in three of the UK’s top 100 sites accept weak passwords such as “123456” or “password”, the study said.

Of course the report was compiled by a password manager and digital wallet outfit called Dashlane but it is a little difficult to fudge figures these bad. Two in three e-commerce sites do not attempt to block entry after 10 incorrect password entries. Sites that fail to implement rudimentary measures to block brute force attacks include Amazon UK, Next, Tesco and New Look.

Dashlane examined the e-commerce sites using a set of 26 criteria, including mandatory password length, acceptance of the 10 most commonly hacked passwords and whether or not they displayed users’ password in plain text. Each criterion was given a merit or demote point value, leading to a possible total score between -100 and 100 for each site.

Teletext Holidays, Urban Outfitters and Holland & Barrett received the three lowest scores. Virgin Atlantic and Ocado were also among the lowest ranked sites as they all received scores of -35 or below.

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