AI chatbots, SQL injection, database leaks, or the leakage of social security numbers—cyber threats to e-shops are real and underestimated. Find out what threatens your online store and how to defend against it.
Before I started working in cybersecurity, I worked in e-commerce. I managed the website, handled complaints, and communicated with customers. Security? It was only addressed when something stopped working. Today, looking at it from the other side, I see things that would have interested me back then—and perhaps even surprised me.
E-shops are among the most common targets of cyberattacks. Not because attackers are interested in the goods being sold—but because e-shops process a huge amount of personal and payment data, often with a lower level of protection than banking or healthcare systems. And it is precisely this disparity that attackers exploit.
An AI chatbot that knows too much
AI assistants and chatbots are now a common feature of online stores. They help customers select products, answer questions, and handle simple requests. The problem arises when a chatbot isn’t properly isolated from internal systems and data.
The OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) organization lists prompt injection as the number one threat in its LLM Top 10—a list of the most serious security risks in AI applications. This is a technique in which an attacker, using specially crafted inputs, can force an AI model to ignore its security settings and behave in a way for which it was not designed. In the context of an e-shop, this could mean extracting internal pricing rules, inventory information, or even technical details about the systems used.
Another risk is so-called training data poisoning—a situation where the data used to train or configure an AI model is compromised, which affects its behavior in a way that isn’t immediately apparent.
What to do about it: AI tools deployed in an e-commerce store should have a strictly defined scope of data access based on the least privilege principle—that is, the minimum permissions necessary for their function. Regular security testing of AI components should be part of every release cycle.
Employees as the Point of Entry
The theft of employee credentials is one of the most common initial attack vectors for e-commerce platforms. An attacker does not need to breach the system’s technical defenses—all they need is to obtain a valid employee login.
There are several well-documented techniques for this. Credential stuffing exploits password leaks from other services—if an employee uses the same password for their work account and for a personal email account that was part of a leak, the attacker will know this before the IT department does. Spear phishing is a targeted phishing attack tailored to a specific individual—for example, an email purporting to be from a supplier or an internal colleague that leads to a fake login page.
Furthermore, in smaller e-commerce stores, it is common for multiple employees to share administrator accounts, which makes it impossible to audit who performed which action—and significantly complicates the incident response.
What to do about it: Each employee should have their own account with permissions corresponding to their role (the principle of role-based access control). Implementing MFA (multi-factor authentication) significantly reduces the risk of stolen login credentials being misused. Upon termination of employment—immediately revoke all access privileges.
Customer Database Leak
An e-commerce store’s customer database contains names, email addresses, shipping addresses, order history—and in some cases, stored payment information. For an attacker, this is an extremely valuable target: databases are sold on dark web forums, where they are used for further phishing campaigns, fraud, or identity theft.
Despite decades of awareness campaigns, the most common technical vector for database breaches remains SQL injection—a technique in which an attacker injects malicious code into a web application’s input fields to manipulate database queries. According to OWASP, injection has long been among the top security risks for web applications. Another common vector is unsecured API endpoints or misconfigured cloud storage.
From a GDPR perspective, a leak of customers’ personal data is a security incident that must be reported to the Office for Personal Data Protection within 72 hours of its discovery. Penalties for violations can reach up to 4% of a company’s annual turnover.
What to do about it: Database encryption, regular penetration tests targeting injection vulnerabilities, minimizing the amount of data stored, and a clearly defined incident response plan—that is, a procedure we can initiate immediately when an incident occurs.
Age-restricted e-shops: when you store a birth number
E-shops selling age-restricted goods—tobacco, vape products, alcohol, fireworks—are legally required to verify the customer’s age. In practice, this means they store copies of identification documents or birth numbers. From a cybersecurity and personal data protection perspective, this is a special category of data requiring a significantly higher level of protection.
A birth number and ID card number, combined with a name and address, are sufficient for identity theft—an attacker can use them to enter into fraudulent contracts, take out loans, or forge documents in the victim’s name. A breach of such a database has far more serious consequences for the individuals concerned than a typical leak of email addresses.
This data should be stored separately from regular order data, encrypted using the AES-256 standard, with strictly limited access, and only for as long as is strictly necessary to fulfill a legal obligation—not permanently. Furthermore, under the GDPR, conducting a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is mandatory in most cases when processing such data.
What to do: Consulting with a data protection expert before launching such an e-shop is not a luxury—it is a necessity. Technical measures (encryption, pseudonymization, access restrictions) must go hand in hand with legal documentation.
Conclusion
An e-shop is not just a website with a shopping cart. It is a system that processes the personal data of hundreds or thousands of people every day—and bears full responsibility for it. Cyber threats in e-commerce are nothing new, but with the advent of AI tools, the growing volume of sensitive data, and increasingly sophisticated attacks, the situation is changing faster than ever before.
Most of these threats can be prevented—if addressed before they become a problem. Our clients confirm this: a systematic approach to cybersecurity has helped them identify vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them—and not just in the e-commerce environment. If you’d like to know how your e-shop is faring, we’d be happy to help. Contact us.
