The consequences of DDoS-driven downtime. The damaging effects of DDoS attacks. Warning signs that your website could be targeted, and DDoS survival starts with fast mitigation

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Safeguarding e-Commerce Revenues from DDoS Attacks in Q4
The Q4 holiday shopping season is prime time for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks
against e-tailers. As U.S. retail e-Commerce sales continue on a steady upward climb, DDoS attacks
are following a similar upward trajectory. Like the proverbial Grinch, attackers are launching
attacks that can result in lengthy outages with disruption to sales and services, which can
devastate profits and your brand.
Many online businesses think it won’t happen to them – and that is a critical mistake. What if your
site was taken offline by a DDoS attack? Who would you call first? How long would it take for
services to be restored? How much sales revenue could you lose? Your answers and preparation
can make the difference between a highly profitable or truly miserable online holiday sales season
for your business.
The consequences of DDoS-driven downtime
A DDoS attacker aims to overwhelm a computer resource to make it run so slowly as to be
unusable – or to crash it completely. In Prolexic’s experience, gained from mitigating denial of
service attacks against many leading e-Commerce sites, we have seen that the longer a website is
rendered unavailable by a DDoS attack, the greater the amount of lost revenue. For example, a
popular e-Commerce website told Prolexic it had calculated that it lost US$1,000 per second when
it was brought down by DDoS attackers. How much would your business lose?
For most e-tailers, the Q4 holiday shopping season is the most profitable quarter of the year,
which makes a DDoS attack most damaging at this time – and attackers know that. Forrester
Research and Gartner have estimated that e-Commerce businesses incur more than US$1 billion in
revenue loss caused by customer click-aways if a website loads slowly or is not accessible. Yet the
total number of attacks increased 29 percent when December 2012 was compared to December
2011. DDoS mitigation experts expect even more attacks in Q4 2013.
The damaging effects of DDoS attacks
The main effects of denial of service attacks on an e-Commerce business are the following:
• Lost or deferred revenue – If your site is taken offline you cannot make sales and process
orders. And the longer the outage, the more sales revenues you lose.
• Brand damage due to loss of customer satisfaction – The site’s brand perception suffers
damage on multiple levels, especially during the holidays. Some customers will turn to
competitors to complete their holiday shopping and may never return, while others may
post their complaints about the site outage on social media networks for the world to see.
• Stock price and investor confidence – Investors are watching and some companies have
seen stock prices temporarily fall by nearly 50 percent after news of a DDoS attack.
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2. • Damage to search engine ranking – Prolexic has seen cases in which it has taken an eCommerce site more than 30 days to restore its search engine ranking after an outage
caused by a DDoS attack.
Executive Suite Series
Warning signs that your website could be targeted
The emergence of easy-to-use DDoS toolkits makes it simple for malicious actors to launch DDoS
attacks – using computers and even mobile apps. This makes it urgent that all organizations of all
sizes take the threat of DDoS attack seriously. You can start with knowing the following warning
signs that your site may be a target:
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Another site in your industry has been attacked
Hacker chatter about who they plan to target next
Someone in your organization has posted messages that upsets hactivists
You’ve received an extortion or blackmail demand
Your network has experienced undiagnosed problems
DDoS survival starts with fast mitigation
Minutes count when DDoS attacks hit. The faster that DDoS mitigation services can be deployed,
the shorter the outage experienced by an e-Commerce site, resulting in minimized revenue loss.
Get the full white paper for details, an e-Commerce case study, best practices and more
Download the white paper for details about why experts are sounding the alarm about DDoS
attacks on e-Commerce businesses this holiday season and how you can protect your business.
The white paper also includes:
• A case study about a Prolexic customer in the e-Commerce industry who was the target of
multiple DDoS attacks and fought back successfully
• Best practices to minimize or eliminate damage from DDoS attacks targeting your business
• A link to a free DDoS protection planning tool that can give you insight into your DDoS risk,
along with recommendations for how to improve your DDoS defenses.
The more you know about DDoS attacks, the better you can protect your network against
cybercrime. Download the free white paper at www.prolexic.com/safeguarding.
About Prolexic
Prolexic Technologies is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of DDoS protection and
mitigation services. Learn more at www.prolexic.com.
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