Day After Christmas DDoS?

During the holiday season, warnings for websites are typically all about security on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which take place in November. But is your website prepared for Dec. 26? Traditionally, the day is known as "Boxing Day," but to a lot of people, it is "Put that gift back in the box and return it" Day. With folks looking to return items and more folks looking to take advantage of post-Christmas sales, Dec. 26 is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

 

During the busy shopping season, Akamai Technology said there is an uptick in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at retail sites, and it was pointed out to me in an e-mail that it is easy to connect the dots and see that these attacks will likely occur on Dec. 26.

 

Combine the high holiday traffic with the hacktivism of the past few weeks and I think Akamai's concern is spot on. The Akamai warning comes based on an attack it saw Nov. 30, when five major retailers were targeted (Akamai was able to thwart the DDoS attack). According to an article in Boston.com:

Akamai declined to reveal who the retailers were, but said they had been the targets of a carefully coordinated assault launched from botnets in Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, and the Philippines. Yet even Akamai engineers did not realize how extensive the attacks were, because the company's automatic responses to the traffic surge were so effective.

The DDoS attacks don't usually carry the same kind of security risk as other network violations, but they do hurt end business, as customers can't get into the website and may end up frustrated enough not to return.

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