A study by the Ponemon Institute
As the holiday season approaches, retailers look forward to, and prepare for what should be a daily revenue surge that respondents in the study calculate as an average of 55 percent. Respondents also expressed concern that a corresponding surge in attacks in these timeframes puts those business gains at risk, with losses on average of as much £300,000 per hour, or £5,000 a minute. Some 66 percent expect that disruption would result in customer churn that would damage reputation and brand and could push losses as high as £2.1 million from a single hour of disruption.
According to RSA, The Security Division of EMC, that was behind the survey, organisational preparedness and action is lacking. While 64 percent of organisations see significant increases in attack activity, more than 70 percent of organisations do not take additional precautions in anticipation of increased attacks. With current capabilities, 51 percent say that they do not have real-time visibility into web traffic making it difficult to identify the root cause of such attacks – leaving only 23 percent feeling that most attacks can be quickly detected and remediated. The report also identifies the top nine scenarios organisations will likely face approaching Cyber Monday with the vast majority categorising these as difficult or very difficult to detect. In order of likelihood, the attack scenarios are:
· Botnet and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
· App Store Fraud
· Mobile Access/Account Compromise
· Click Fraud
· Stolen Credit Card Validation
· eCoupon Abuse
· Account Hijacking
· Electronic Wallet Abuse
· Brand Promotion Hijacking.
Demetrios Lazarikos, IT Threat Strategist at RSA, said:
“The competitive climate and the unpredictability of the economy does not leave organisations much margin for business error. Unfortunately, the stealth and savvy cybercriminals have advanced to a point where traditional security and fraud defences on which businesses rely on are at best insufficient and at worst …. obsolete. Business logic abuse hides in plain sight because it uses ‘legitimate’ processes for illegitimate gain. The problem requires universal visibility, a risk layered approach, and a new way of understanding the adversary. Isolating the outliers in crowd behavior that indicate attacks is critical for identifying malicious behavior and business logic abuse.”
And Larry Ponemon, Ph.D., Chairman and Founder, The Ponemon Institute, CIPP, said: “While the findings here are admittedly shocking, they underscore an age-old issue in that budgets and business dynamics perpetuate vulnerability and keep organizations behind the eight ball. However, all is not lost. Forward-thinking organizations that have the agility to break from the status quo and embrace innovation can not only better protect their business, but also gain a massive advantage. Reducing losses from fraud and increasing trust in the brand can propel a business ahead of its competitors.”
Read the full report: The 2013 eCommerce Cyber Crime Report: Safeguarding Brand And Re venue This Holiday Season
