In response to the latest reports on the Amazon’s downtime during this week’s Prime Day including estimates that the outage potentially resulted in ~$75 million in lost sales and was comparable to a self-invited DDOS) attack, Corero Network Security offers comments.
Sean Newman, Director Product Management 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 organization 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 organizations 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 an organization feel the need to pay-up, to keep the 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.”
