Estimated Brand Damage Equals $3.4M per Hour on Cyber Monday

Nicole Giannopoulos

10/29/2013

During the holiday shopping season, retailers must secure their e-commerce websites and keep customers loyal. On Cyber Monday, shoppers can boost sales significantly, however an average of $3.4 million is what reputation and brand damage can cost as a result of the loss of customers in just one hour of downtime, according to a recently published report by Ponemon Institute, "The 2013 eCommerce Cyber Crime Report: Safeguarding Brand and Revenue this Holiday Season."

Detection of fraud is difficult due to the lack of real-time visibility, more than half of respondents say their organization does not have real-time visibility into its website to detect the presence of a criminal. Only 36% say their organizations use automated forensic tools that detect business logic abuses.

Many retailers make significant investments in website marketing, only to realize losses if they are not ready to deal with the potential threat of attacks on Cyber Monday. Understanding the cost of downtime and more importantly, the cost of reputation and brand can help make the business case for investing in the resources necessary to stop fraud and preserve the integrity of customer-facing websites. Here are some key findings from the report:

51% of respondents estimate that revenues on Cyber Monday will increase more than 50%
An average of almost 5% of total revenues (gross sales) were lost due to the financial and brand impact of internet fraud during the past 12 months
Downtime on Cyber Monday is expected to cost an average of almost $500,000
83% says Botnet or DoS attacks are more likely to occur on high traffic days, and 72% say it would be very difficult to detect
78% say mobile fraud is more likely to occur on Cyber Monday than other times
66% say click fraud (or non-authentic pay "per clicks") is more likely to occur
61% of respondents say that account hijacking is more likely to occur
Only 21% of respondents say most internet fraud that occurs on their company's websites are quickly detected and remediated
One-third are taking special precautions to ensure high availability and integrity of customer-facing websites during high traffic days such as Cyber Monday
51% say their organization lacks real-time visibility into its website traffic to make it possible to immediately detect the presence of a criminal, this leads to the problem 46% of respondents have in understanding the root cause of an attack

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