The holiday shopping season is fast approaching, and it’s prime time for cyber attackers who hope to catch enterprises at their weakest moments.
According to a new survey of 1,100 retail companies conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by RSA, daily revenue surges by an average of 55 percent during the holiday season. However, if a retail site is hacked or disabled, average losses could amount to as much as $500,000 per hour, or $8,000 per minute, according to a Dark Reading report.
Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) say that such a disruption could result in customer churn that would damage reputation and brand, pushing losses as high as $3.4 million from a single hour of disruption.
While 64 percent of organizations say they see significant increases in attacks during the holidays, more than 70 percent of retailers do not take additional precautions in anticipation of these attacks. With their currently installed technology, 51 percent say they do not have real-time visibility into Web traffic, which makes it difficult to identify the root cause of attacks.
Twenty-three percent say they feel that most holiday-season attacks can be quickly detected and remediated, the report says.
The top nine attacks, according to the Ponemon report, that organizations will likely face during the holiday season are:
- Botnets and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks
- App store fraud
- Mobile access/account compromise
- Click fraud
- Stolen credit card validation
- E-coupon abuse
- Account hijacking
- Electronic wallet abuse
- Brand promotion hijacking
