Amazon had a dodgy hour during Prime Day when their website was unresponsive and it looks like it potentially cost them around $75 million in lost sales. It was pretty much an Amazon invited DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.
Sean Newman, Director at Corero Network Security:
“Although Amazon appears to have been a DDoS victim of its own making, this just goes to show how even an organisation with such immense resources can still be vulnerable to denial of service attacks. And, when you look at the estimated potential financial impact of this, it’s not difficult to understand why organisations which rely on delivering online services cannot afford to be vulnerable to DDoS attacks. Plus, there are two sides to risking such obvious, and significant, financial impact; firstly, if you get attacked, there’s the direct impact but, secondly, you lay yourself open to DDoS for Ransom.
“With such significant, and easily calculable, revenue at risk for every minute of downtime, a potential DDoS attacker can readily size a ransom demand which is way less than the sum at risk but, still presents a healthy return for the cyber-criminal, should you feel the need to pay-up, to keep your business online. Of course, the alternative is to deploy the latest generation of real-time, automatic DDoS protection and know you can safely ignore any such demands.”
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