Hole In the Shopping Cart

This could hold down the online sales profits:

A flaw in popular shopping cart software allows customers to modify the price of items that they purchase, a security firm has warned.

ShopFactory, from 3D3.com in Australia, stores prices in cookies on the customer browser, and customers can change those prices by simply editing the cookies using a text editor, according to Trust Factory.

The information is stored in a customer’s cookies only if the merchant sets the software to remember the information in the shopping cart; the problem can be worked around if merchants upgrade to at least Version 5.8 of ShopFactory and set the value of “Remember Shopping cart for (days)” to zero, Trust Factory said.

I wonder who this announcement benefited: in other words, does InternetWeek have more online retailers or customers as readers? Did they plug more holes or put ideas into heads that wouldn’t have otherwise had them?

Amazon still only has the 5.0 available. 5.8 beta is available through the company’s site, but the final version wasn’t up as of this afternoon.