When it comes down to it, the process of protecting your e-commerce site from malicious hackers isn't too different from that of setting up defenses around any other kind of Internet site. The only characteristic that distinguishes an e-commerce site from other kinds of sites is its ability to take payment information from customers, which means there's one more way to attack the site. The scores of techniques that can bring down ordinary sites apply to e-commerce sites as well. This is why Hack Proofing Your E-Commerce Site doesn't so much distinguish itself from the collection of "defending against hackers" books already out there, as supplement those books' content with additional material that's specific to e-commerce. This book treats site defense generally, with extra material on encrypted services and payment-protection schemes.

The sections specifically about buying and selling on the Internet--they make up about a third of this book--appear to have been well researched, and go beyond the merely technical to comment on the legal aspects of attacking digital money transactions. You'll probably learn a lot from the authors' discussions of laws designed to protect the consumer from fraud on the Internet and the amount of trouble they can cause e-commerce businesses. Those sections, since they cover material that's not well explained elsewhere, carry this book on their own. --David Wall

Topics covered: General issues of Internet site defense--including modes of attack (with emphasis on distributed denial of service), secure design principles, security policies, and incident response--supplemented by issues specific to electronic commerce. E-commerce subjects include legal matters, the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol, and relations with credit-card issuers.