Like other disasters in which preparedness can minimize damage, taking action before a DDoS attack strikes can significantly reduce downtime. Learn how to protect your holiday e-Commerce sales in this report.

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How to Protect Holiday e-Retail Sales from DDoS Attacks
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a website can be devastating for e-retail sales
during the peak sales season. Prolexic, the largest and most trusted provider of distributed denial
of service (DDoS) protection services, advises e-retailers to put strong DDoS protection measures
in place in advance of the holiday shopping season to prevent the damage from DDoS attacks,
which can take your online website down for several days.
Many online businesses think it won’t happen to them – and that is a critical mistake. These
malicious Internet-based attacks have become an unfortunate fact of life for e-retailers, especially
during the holiday shopping season. 29 percent more DDoS attacks occurred in December 2012
compared to a year earlier, and it’s not likely to get any better in Q4 2013. In fact, other trends for
2013 show DDoS attacks are more powerful than in years past – and more numerous.
Like other disasters in which preparedness can minimize damage, taking action before a DDoS
attack strikes can significantly reduce downtime. When your sales traffic comes to a halt, panic
ensues and the phones start ringing with unhappy customers, minutes count. Being prepared with
a full-service DDoS mitigation service vendor engaged and a DDoS attack plan in place can make
the difference between having a brief site outage that lasts only a few seconds and having your
business disappear from the Internet for days – or even a week.
Based on Prolexic’s experience defending some of the world’s leading e-Commerce sites against
DDoS attacks, we have identified the DDoS mitigation playbook as a significant action e-retailers
can take to minimize site downtime caused by a denial of service attack, and we work with all our
clients to create – and practice – a custom playbook in advance of a DDoS attack to ensure a
streamlined and fully effective response from all participants.
The importance of choosing the best DDoS mitigation service
Not all DDoS mitigation plans are of equal quality. The more DDoS appliances and/or mitigation
service providers involved in your DDoS mitigation response, the slower the deployment of
effective DDoS protection, and the longer it takes to bring the site back online.
For example, if an e-Commerce site uses the add-on DDoS mitigation services of both an ISP and a
Content Delivery Network (CDN), the site’s management can waste 30 minutes or more deciding
which one to call first – while sales have ground to a halt. Then, after determining the type of DDoS
attack exceeds its capabilities, the ISP, for example, may give up and defer to the CDN, at which
point the site’s management will incur further delay to initiate contact with the CDN and lose even
more time waiting for the CDN’s response.
What’s more, when both an ISP and CDN deploy DDoS mitigation services, one may mistakenly
conclude that the other’s network activity is a part of the DDoS attacker’s malicious traffic and
block the other service, causing more delay.
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2. If a piece of the mitigation plan is to deploy in-house DDoS appliances upon detection of a DDoS
attack, IT must take still more time to deploy the appliances and reconfigure the network to work
with them. All the while, your e-retail site remains closed for business during the holiday shopping
season instead of generating the year’s highest daily revenue.
When you work with a single source of DDoS mitigation services that is capable of stopping all
DDoS attacks, like Prolexic, DDoS attacks should take no more than minutes to stop once traffic
starts flowing through the DDoS mitigation service.
Unfortunately, it typically takes an ISP or CDN several hours or days to block a DDoS attack, and
they often fail completely. It doesn’t have to be that way. Prolexic is focused solely on fast DDoS
mitigation to help businesses to minimize downtime and revenue loss and to prevent brand
damage.
ISPs and CDNs may argue that automated mitigation systems can respond faster in nonrandomized attacks, but automated systems tend to create a large number of false positives and
tend to cause some collateral damage to the application it is intended to protect. In addition, a CDN
using automated tools alone needs hours to create and deploy new filtering rules during a
randomized Layer 7 attack, as opposed to the minutes that it would take for live DDoS mitigation
experts to respond.
Get the full white paper for more details about what should go into a DDoS attack playbook,
plus an e-Commerce case study, DDoS protection best practices and more
Download the white paper for details about why experts are sounding the alarm about DDoS
attacks on e-Commerce businesses this holiday season and how you can protect your business.
The white paper also includes:
• A case study about a Prolexic customer in the e-Commerce industry who was the target of
multiple DDoS attacks and fought back successfully
• Best practices to minimize or eliminate damage from DDoS attacks targeting your business
• A link to a free DDoS protection planning tool that can give you insight into your DDoS risk,
along with recommendations for how to improve your DDoS defenses.
The more you know about DDoS attacks, the better you can protect your network against
cybercrime. Download the free white paper at www.prolexic.com/safeguarding.
About Prolexic
Prolexic Technologies is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of DDoS protection and
mitigation services. Learn more at www.prolexic.com.
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