The Implemented Security Measures of Sainsbury’s E-commerce Platform and judging its Compliance with E-business Ethics along with Proposals for Additional Improvement

Sainsbury's online shopping platform has enforced diverse security standards to safeguard shopper data and confirm compliance with essential e-business ethics. Some of the key enforced security measures are discussed in this slide.

Session Cookies: Sainsbury's e-commerce shopping platform possesses cookies like AWSALB, SESSION_COOKIEACCEPT, and WC_SESSION_ESTABLISHED. These cookies help to maintain shopper sessions securely in the e-commerce platform and ensure that shopper interactions are protected and isolated.

Anti-Malware Actions: Sainsbury's online shopping platform possesses some cookies that profoundly help the platform to safeguard itself and its users from malicious website invasions such as bm_sz and bm_sv. The cookies bm_sz and bm_sv are developed to safeguard against malicious website invasions. This indicates that Sainsbury's e-commerce platform has enforced measures to protect against malicious and malware activities.

Visitor Validation: Further, Sainsbury's online platform also possesses some features that help the platform to identify that a request on its website is driven by shoppers, not by additional sites such as “AEC cookies”. AEC cookies are developed to ensure that appeals within an e-commerce platform's browsing session are created by the people and not by any other sites.

Data Protection and Compliance: The e-commerce platform of Sainsbury's possesses such functionalities which allow it to maintain compliance with data protection regulations such as OptanonAlertBoxClosed and OptanonConsent. These cookies are linked with “OneTrust's cookie compliance solution” and allow a shopping platform to comply with data protection regulations. This indicates that Sainsbury's online shopping platform possesses measures to comply with regulations of data protection which help the platform to maintain all data protection laws appropriately.

Secure Authentication: Sainsbury's online shopping platform possesses cookies that help the platform to confirm the secure authentication of users while reaching the platform such as “oauth2_authentication_csrf”. This cookie improves the secure authentication of users by implementing CSRF or Cross-Site Request Forgery protection. By validating this CSRF token kept in the cookie per request, Sainsbury's online platform ensures that just legitimate requests stemming from authenticated shoppers are processed. This helps Sainsbury’s platform to safeguard shopper’s accounts from unauthorised access.

Further suggestions for enhancing the Security Measures of Sainsbury's:

Data Retention: Some embedded cookies on the online platform of Sainsbury’s have extended durations, like Name_cls_v which has a duration of “1824 days”. This long-term data retention by cookies raises worries regarding data retention guidelines (GOV.UK, 2022). Sainsbury's should inspect and potentially compress the duration of such cookies to minimise risks of data exposure.

Third-party Cookies: Sainsbury's shopping platform also possesses diverse third-party cookies in place which may further raise concerns of data exposure. Sainsbury's should periodically audit and review all third-party cookies to confirm that they capitulate with security measures and do not create privacy hazards to shoppers.

Ongoing Monitoring of Security Measures: Enforcing real-time alerting and monitoring mechanisms can assist detect and reply to security happenings promptly. This helps in minimising the effect of possible cyber security threats (Ncsc.gov.uk, 2024). Hence, Sainsbury’s should also focus on conducting ongoing monitoring of security measures.