While new cybersecurity threats emerge all the time, some long-standing basic threats have never gone away. The humble brute-force security attack, the distributed denial of service (DDoS), came back with a vengeance during the COVID crisis. Amazon experienced the largest DDoS attack of all time in February 2020, and there were large attacks on gaming and media sites and servers, as well as an onslaught of ransom-driven DDoS attacks.
The COVID-19 virus has attacked more than just health and people’s freedom of movement. It has also succeeded at undermining online security as more organizations and people rely on their online presence exclusively and turn to internet-based work, study, purchases and communications. The traffic spikes characteristic of the early part of the crisis have started to stabilize, meaning that uptime should also be stable for regular traffic, regardless of volume if you’re monitoring your availability and making provisions for redundancy. But irregular traffic booms, which are often the harbinger of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is entirely another creature.
During the COVID-19 crisis, cyberattacks, such as DDoS and ransomware/phishing attacks, have proliferated. These have been particularly acute in specific essential industries, such as healthcare, finance, energy, media and supply chain. The scale of these attacks can be devastating, as they can spread quickly and globally if undetected or unprevented.
E-commerce platforms, in preparation for the strain that will hit their sites in the lead-up to holiday shopping and promotions, work hard to ensure uptime and performance. Does this focus take away from their preparedness for the cracks in security that almost inevitably arise during these peak traffic periods?
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