Cyber Monday attacks could cost organisations up to $3.4m per hour including damage to reputation and brand, according to a new report from EMC’s security division RSA.
The report also revealed that the rise in attacks drives hard losses, usually, as much as about $500,000 per hour or $8,000 per minute.
However, 64% of organisations reported a major rise in attack activity, with 23% of attacks being spotted quickly and remediated, and about 70% of businesses do not take extra precautions anticipating bigger attacks.
About 51% of respondents with current capabilities, stated they do not have real-time visibility into web traffic, which makes it difficult to detect the main cause for such attacks, while only 23% felt that majority of attacks can be rapidly identified and remediated.
RSA IT Threat Strategist Demetrios Lazarikos said that the competitive climate and the unpredictability of the economy does not leave organisations much margin for business error.
"Unfortunately, the stealth and savvy cybercriminals have advanced to a point where traditional security and fraud behaviour on which businesses rely on are at best insufficient and at worst….obsolete," Lazarikos said.
"Business logic abuse hides in plain sight because it uses ‘legitimate’ processes for illegitimate gain.
"The problem requires universal visibility, a risk layered approach, and a new way of understanding the adversary.
"Isolating the outliers in crowd behaviour that indicate attacks is critical for identifying malicious behaviour and business logic abuse."
According to the security firm, major scenarios experienced by organisations when nearing Cyber Monday include botnet and distributed denial of service (DDoS), app store fraud, mobile access/account compromise, click fraud, stolen credit card validation, ecoupon abuse, account hijacking, electronic wallet abuse, brand promotion hijacking.