Cybersecurity in e-commerce: Key threats and practical protection strategies
E-commerce remains one of the most frequently targeted sectors, where the growing scale of DDoS attacks, automated data scraping, and attempts to exploit application vulnerabilities and compromised accounts directly impact service availability and competitiveness. Therefore, an approach based on analyzing and filtering traffic before it reaches the infrastructure, distinguishing between different types of bots, protecting the application layer, and building a consistent, multi-layered security strategy becomes essential to ensure stable store operations even under heavy load.
The e-commerce sector remains one of the main targets of cyberattacks – as shown by Cloudflare reports, the online retail sector consistently ranks among the most attacked industries, particularly in terms of DDoS attacks and bot abuse, which during peak sales periods can account for a significant portion of total traffic.
DDoS attacks – one of the most serious threats to e-commerce
In recent years, e-commerce has been growing at a very rapid pace. More and more companies are moving their sales online, and for many organizations, the online store is no longer just an additional sales channel but has become a key element of the entire business. In practice, this means that the availability of the sales platform now has a direct impact on company revenue.
At the same time, as online commerce grows, new threats are emerging that did not exist before. In the past, the biggest risks for a store were theft or burglary. Today, as sales take place in a digital environment, threats have also moved online. One of the most common and at the same time most severe are DDoS attacks.
What is a DDoS attack in practice?
A DDoS attack involves flooding a server or web application with a massive number of requests, causing system overload and ultimately preventing the website from functioning properly. In such a situation, servers are unable to handle the traffic and stop responding to legitimate users.
For e-commerce businesses, this is particularly problematic because website availability directly translates into the ability to generate sales. If an online store stops working, customers cannot access the site, add products to their cart, or complete their purchase.
This can be compared to a physical store. If the store is closed, customers cannot enter and make purchases. In the online world, it works exactly the same way. Every minute of downtime means real financial loss and missed orders.
Why it is so easy to launch a DDoS attack today
A few years ago, carrying out a large DDoS attack required significant technical resources and access to a large number of infected computers. Today, the situation looks completely different, and one of the main reasons is the massive number of devices connected to the internet.
In addition to computers and smartphones, these include surveillance cameras, TVs, smart controllers, robot vacuums, and even household appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, or dishwashers equipped with Wi-Fi modules.
The problem is that many of these devices are not properly updated in terms of security. Manufacturers primarily focus on functionality and new features, while security often takes a back seat.
As a result, such devices can be taken over by cybercriminals and used as part of a botnet, a network of infected devices that simultaneously generate traffic toward a selected target.
The scale of attacks is increasing year by year
Importantly, the problem of DDoS attacks is not diminishing — it is becoming more serious each year. According to global data, around 14 million such attacks were recorded in 2023. Two years later, this number exceeded 47 million.
In practice, this means that effective protection against DDoS attacks must meet two key conditions. First, the system must be able to accurately analyze traffic and distinguish legitimate requests from malicious ones. Second, the infrastructure must be efficient enough to handle massive volumes of traffic without becoming overloaded.
Scraping – an invisible problem for many online stores
Another threat that is very common in e-commerce is data scraping from websites. In practice, this involves automatically querying a website to collect publicly available information.
In the case of online stores, this usually concerns products, prices, availability, and price change history. If we run a store selling electronics, home appliances, or clothing, we almost always operate in a highly competitive environment. Competitors want to know what products we offer, how much they cost, and how prices change over time.
In the offline world, obtaining such information would require visiting many stores and manually checking prices. On the internet, everything is much simpler because most of this data is directly available on the website.
This makes it possible to monitor:
• current product prices,
• price changes over time,
• availability of specific items,
• the entire structure of the store’s offering.
Based on such data, competitors can automatically adjust their prices to offer products cheaper at a given moment or respond faster to market changes.
Scraping as a standalone business
It is also worth noting that scraping is not always performed directly by competing stores. In practice, there are many companies that specialize in collecting and analyzing such data.
They provide their clients with reports on product prices, availability across different stores, and market trends. For e-commerce businesses, this means that data about their offerings can be collected and analyzed at scale, often in a fully automated way.
That is why more and more companies are starting to treat scraping not just as a technical curiosity, but as a real business issue that can impact pricing strategies and competitiveness.
Automated traffic is not always bad
At this point, an important issue arises. A large portion of internet traffic is generated by bots, but not all of them have a negative impact on website performance.
In fact, there are two types of bots:
• bad bots, which perform scraping or attempt to exploit the website in unwanted ways
• good bots, which support the functioning of the website on the internet
A good example is search engine bots, such as Google crawlers. Their role is to analyze the website, check its structure, and index content so that it can appear in search results.
This process is called crawling.
Bots scan the site, check HTTP headers, server response times, and certificate validity, and then use this information to rank the site in search engines.
From an e-commerce business perspective, this is extremely important because visibility in search engines directly translates into user traffic and sales.
A new player: AI bots and engines
Recently, another factor has further complicated the situation. More and more users are using AI-based tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini to find specific products that meet their requirements.
In practice, this means that AI systems also analyze websites to gather information about products, prices, and technical parameters. If such a system determines that a given store offers the best option, it may provide a direct link to the product.
From an e-commerce perspective, this can become an additional source of traffic and sales. That is why it is important not to block all automated traffic, but to properly classify it.
Application-layer attacks and compromised user accounts
An online store is essentially a web application, which means that in addition to DDoS attacks and bot traffic, it is also exposed to classic application-layer attacks. In many systems, logs still regularly show attempts to exploit vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection or Cross-Site Scripting. Although these are among the oldest and best-known web application attack techniques, they remain very common in practice.
In most cases, modern protection systems such as WAF (Web Application Firewall) can effectively detect and block such attempts. The problem arises with zero-day attacks, which have not yet been described and do not have signatures in security systems. In such cases, protection must rely not only on known attack patterns but also on behavioral analysis of users and application traffic.
Another increasingly common issue is compromised user credentials. Large databases of leaked email addresses, usernames, and passwords are widely available online. If users reuse the same credentials across multiple services, there is a risk they will also be used to access an online store.
From a security perspective, this is particularly dangerous because the attacker operates as an authenticated user. This provides significantly greater capabilities within the system and can lead to abuse or disruption of store operations.
Cloudflare as a protection and acceleration layer for e-commerce
For online stores, it is crucial not only to detect threats but also to neutralize them before they reach the application infrastructure. One increasingly common approach in e-commerce is the use of a global CDN network combined with security mechanisms.
Solutions such as Cloudflare act as an intermediary layer between the user and the store’s infrastructure. All traffic first goes through a global network of edge servers, where it is analyzed and filtered before being forwarded to the application.
This is particularly important in the case of DDoS attacks. Thanks to the massive capacity of such infrastructure (measured in hundreds of terabits per second), even large volumetric attacks can be absorbed and mitigated before reaching the store’s servers. Instead of a single point handling all traffic, requests are distributed across multiple data centers worldwide — so-called PoPs.
This approach protects against both network-level attacks at L3 and L4 layers and more advanced application-layer attacks at the L7 layer.
At the same time, the platform provides bot traffic management mechanisms. Through behavioral analysis, it is possible to distinguish between beneficial bots (such as search engine crawlers) and malicious ones performing scraping or other unwanted activities.
In practice, this means that with Cloudflare, a store can simultaneously:
• block malicious automated traffic
• allow search engine indexing bots
• control traffic generated by AI systems
• protect the application against known and unknown attacks using WAF
• mitigate hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks
Therefore, effective e-commerce security requires not only incident response but, above all, building a multi-layered security strategy that combines infrastructure protection, application security, and monitoring of real platform performance. Properly selected tools and processes not only reduce the risk of attacks but also improve performance and ensure stable operation even under heavy traffic.
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