Cyber Monday Attacks Cost Organizations up to $3.4 Million per Hour in Losses, RSA Finds

RSA, The Security Division of EMC (NYSE: EMC), today 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 organizations 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 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.

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