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Akamai Technologies has just disclosed to Technology Live that it blocked a wave of co-ordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that were intricately designed to block Web traffic from reaching five major Internet retailers for several days.
The attacks began the day after Cyber Monday, the start of the Christmas shopping season. "These attacks were clearly deliberate and aimed to hit retailers when it hurts the most," says Margaret Rivera, Akamai's Industry Marketing Manager, Commerce.
Akamai estimates the attacks could have cost the five retailers a total of over $15 million dollars in lost revenue during a three-day period -- had they not been thwarted.
The majority of attack traffic initiated from computers in Thailand, Mexico, Philippines and Brazil and reached peeks where some of the retailers websites would have been crippled by up to 10,000 times above normal daily traffic.
The retailer attacks came in the same time frame as international attention began to focus on politically-motivated DDoS attacks first to shut down WikiLeaks, and subsequently to knock out MasterCard and Visa to punish the payment services for penalizing WikiLeaks.
Rivera declined to speculate about the motives of the hackers who tried to knock out the retailers' websites. Criminal gangs who control large networks of compromised PCs, known as botnets, have been known to conduct DDoS attacks shutting down gambling sites just before big sporting events, then extorting $50,000 payoffs to terminate such attacks.
"Hackers are increasingly targeting merchants with sophisticated attacks that are often motivated by financial gain, competitive motivations, or political objectives," says Ted Julian, principal analyst at Yankee Group. "The attacks are particularly detrimental for e-retailers, since every minute a site is down can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue."
By Byron Acohido
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