RSA Finds: Cyber Monday Attacks Cost Cos Up To $3.4 Million Per Hour Losses

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, announced the results of a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute looking at the cost of fraud and online disruption coincident with Cyber Monday. The study surveyed 1,100 IT staff inside of retail organizations in the U.S. and UK.

As the holiday season approaches, retail organisations 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 time-frames puts those business gains at risk, with losses on average of as much as $500,000 per hour, or $8,000 per minute. 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.

“While the findings here are admittedly shocking, they underscore an age-old issue in that budgets and business dynamics perpetuate vulnerability and keep organisations behind the eight ball. However, all is not lost,” said Larry Ponemon, Ph.D., Chairman and Founder, The Ponemon Institute, CIPP. “Forward-thinking organisations 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.”

It would seem that the evidence of what is at risk and the inevitability of the threat could not be more urgent, but 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. 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 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 and Brand Promotion Hijacking

“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 defenses on which businesses rely on are at best insufficient and at worst obsolete,“said Demetrios Lazarikos, IT Threat Strategist, RSA, The Security Division of EMC. “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.”