Cyber Monday attacks costs up to $3.4 mn per hour

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to a new study by RSA and the Ponemon Institute, Cyber Monday represents an average 55 percent surge in daily online/mobile retail revenues.

A corresponding surge in attacks drives hard losses, on average, as much as $500,000 per hour or $8,000 per minute. Customer churn from reputation and brand damage can drive losses to as much as $3.4 million from a single hour of disruption.

The study surveyed 1,100 IT staff inside of retail organizations in

the U.S. and UK.

The issue becomes more troubling as 66 percent expect that disruption would result in customer churn that would damage reputation and brand and could push losses as high as $3.4 million from a single hour of disruption.

It would seem that the evidence of what is at risk and the

inevitability of the threat could not be more urgent, but organizational

preparedness and action is lacking. While 64 percent of organizations see

significant increases in attack activity, more than 70 percent of

organizations do not take additional precautions in anticipation of

increased attacks. Additionally, 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 organizations will likely

face approaching Cyber Monday with the vast majority categorizing 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, RSA said: "The competitive climate and the unpredictability of the economy does not leave organizations much margin for business error. Unfortunately, the stealth and savvy cybercriminals have advanced to a point where traditional security and fraud defenses 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."

Larry Ponemon, chairman and funder, The Ponemon Institute, CIPP "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."