ITinfo: DDOS Outages Cost $1.2 Billion

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Web Attacks Cost Bucks

Over a billion dollars spent responding to attacks

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DDOS Outages Cost $1.2 Billion

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Losses related to last week's Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks that shut down several popular websites could easily come to more than $1.2 billion, according to a report from the Yankee Group.

The report says the attacks resulted in capitalization losses that exceeded $1 billion on the days of the attacks and that revenue loss in both sales and advertising dollars is expected to exceed $100 million.

Yahoo, CNN.com, eBay, Buy.com, E-Trade, Amazon.com, and other sites were hit. The attacks caused service outages of up to five hours. Reportedly, the sites that were hit and their Internet peers will spend up to an additional $200 million on security infrastructure upgrades.

The Yankee Group report calls for website administrators to use security-assessment technologies to identify and close the security holes in their systems.

I think The Yankee Group is right on the money. Outages are a big waste of money for e-commerce sites. And these weren't just a random rolling power outage; they were well-planned, targeted attacks. It's time for site admins to get serious about security.

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References

Yankee Group
Message Center

Hackers Take Down Yahoo!
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Hit the Net

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/2000/it000214.html
updated February 14, 2000