What is Customer Journey Hijacking?

A recent study of ‘customer journey hijacking’ found that as many as 20% of all online shopping sessions are exposed to unauthorized and invasive advertising injections. While lost revenue is clearly a negative consequence of hijacking, a business’s reputation can also be affected due to annoying pop-ups and slowed page loading times.

The problem is client-side compromises

Client-side threats are achieved by injecting malicious scripts into the code used to annotate or format a webpage. Because client-side activity happens when a customer is surfing the e-commerce site, it is happening outside of a business’s security perimeter. Typical security technologies won’t protect the customer (or the business) from malicious activity that is occurring on dynamic web pages accessed from the customer’s own device. Essentially, your customer has downloaded malicious code—in the form of pop-up ads—from your server, which is then interpreted and rendered by the customer’s browser on the customer’s device.

The types of vulnerabilities that make ad injections and customer journey hijacking easy include:

• Vulnerable website tools, like JavaScript.
• Lack of attention to web application vulnerabilities.
• Multiple, layered (but likely vulnerable) web applications designed to add website functionality.
• Increasing number of third- and fourth-party sources creating and distributing vulnerable applications.
• Misconfigurations and malicious code in open-source tools.

Fight customer journey hijacking with the right security solutions

Not all cybersecurity solutions are created equal. Some are designed to do very specific things, and most traditional solutions—like web application firewalls (WAFs), policy controls, and threat intelligence—while effective at protecting the server side are not going to protect against malicious attacks targeting the client side.

Implementing client-side security is vital to protect and defend your customer data and your business. To protect against the types of vulnerabilities that contribute to customer journey hijacking and other threats like formjacking, cross-site scripting (XSS), and Magecart attacks, businesses need to consider solutions that have no impact on website functionality but still offer the right type and level of security.

Feroot Security specializes in tools that help protect from client-side attacks. If you would like to ensure your website is using the latest security tools, check out our Inspector and PageGuard products. They are specifically designed to continuously scan and protect your business from attackers. And if you would like to see our products in action, please request a demo here: link.