Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletters
For more info on a specific newsletter, click the title. Details will be displayed in a new window.
Security
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
More E-Mail Newsletters 
 

Internet sieges can cost businesses a bundle

Costs from disruptions can escalate

August 25, 2005 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - When the first extortion e-mail popped into Michael Alculumbre's in-box, he had no idea it was about to cost his business nearly $500,000.
The note arrived in early November of last year, as Alculumbre's London-based transaction processing company, Protx, was being hit by a nasty distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Zombie PCs from around the world were flooding, the company's Web site, Protx.com, and the transaction processing server that was the commercial heart of the business.
In the extortion e-mail's broken English, someone identifying himself as Tony Martino proposed a classic organized-crime protection scheme. "You should pay $10,000," Martino wrote. "When we receive money, we stop attack immediately." The e-mail even promised one year's protection from other attackers for the $10,000 fee.
"Many companies paid us, and use our protection right now," Martino's message said. "Think about how much money you lose, while your servers are down."
The attackers had one thing right: Online attacks can be expensive. A 2004 PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of more than 1,000 businesses in the U.K. found that companies spent an average of more than $17,000 on their worst security incident that year. For large companies, that amount was closer to $210,000, the study found. For companies of all sizes, most of the loss was due to the disruption in their ability to do business, with expenses for troubleshooting the incident and actual cash spent responding to it accounting for considerably less.
It's Expensive
Law enforcement authorities told Protx that it was the victim of Russian organized crime, Alculumbre says, but criminal extortion is not the only motivation for such attacks. In April, Australian antispyware vendor PC Tools Pty. became a target of spyware companies that didn't want users who were interested in PC Tools' spyware-cleansing software to reach the actual PC Tools Web site.
Customers whose PCs had already been infected by spyware were greeted with fake pop-up windows and shopping carts when they tried to purchase the company's Spyware Doctor product, said Simon Clausen, PC Tools' CEO. Instead of buying his company's antispyware software, they were tricked into purchasing useless products that left their computers infected, he said.
Even links that appeared to be from legitimate Web sites like Google or Download.com were modified on fake pages displayed to users, Clausen said. "Any link that said Spyware Doctor would be redirected to the attackers' sites."
Clausen estimates that as much as 15% of his company's business was lost, representing hundreds of thousands of dollars in missed sales. But the real cost was in lost productivity for


Reprinted with permission from

IDG.net
Story copyright 2009 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS
Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.
WHITE PAPER
Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!
WHITE PAPER
Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Centralized Data Backup and Your WAN
Is your organization prepared to tackle the massive challenge of protecting your data in a cost effective and timely manner? With a growing...  

Why Compliance Pays
This OnDemand webcast explores the relationship that firms with best compliance records have higher revenue, greater customer retention, lower financial losses from data...

An All-in-One Approach to Web Security
Granting web access to employees poses challenges to IT administrators and introduces unique security risks. Even as companies have perfected their security techniques...  

Best Practices for Managing Business Risks from the Use of IT
(Source: Symantec) Based on exhaustive benchmarks conducted by the IT Policy Compliance, this session highlights the relationship between business risks and use of...

The Hidden Dangers of Spam
Beyond the well-understood productivity drain that spam inflicts on businesses, threats posed by illicit email circulating through a network are causing many security...  

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

Open Source Security Myths Dispelled
(Source: Astaro) Open Source Software is computer software whose source code is available to the general public. This openly viewable nature...  

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Webinar
(Source: Sun) This webinar replay discusses Sun OpenSSO Enterprise innovation--the single, open-source solution that helps your business solve the challenges around internal access...

Best Practices for Backing Up VMware® with Veritas NetBackup™
VMware® is used by enterprises large and small to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. With this in mind, Symantec...  

Agile Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Rapid ROI
(Source: IBM) Content rich business processes are a core feature of daily operations at just about any organization today. Very often these essential...