advertisement
advertisement

Rivals Hate Amazon, Except During A D-DOS Attack. Retailers Then Are A Band Of HTML Brothers

Written by Evan Schuman
February 1st, 2013

As the online (and mobile) leader by a very wide margin, Amazon certainly generates a generous share of envy and hatred from E-tailers and retailers alike. They all quietly celebrate every Amazon misstep and piece of investor pain—except one. When Amazon has an outage and the E-Commerce king is trying to convince everyone that the site was not the victim of a D-DOS attack, every rival is in its corner.

On Thursday (Jan. 31), Amazon was down for about 49 minutes, which is certainly a notable event. One cyberthief group tweeted responsibility, claiming “we used a 7kbotnet running hoic 100 threads each. 80servers in botnet and a 16gbps booter.” Does it make much of a difference whether the outage was caused by an internal IT screw-up, an unexpectedly huge number of shoppers looking at a specific sale or an outside malicious group? Absolutely.

From a logical numeric perspective, there is minimal difference; but psychology paints a very different HREF. Amazon has been legendarily effective at thwarting these attacks, even when major chains fall victim to the same assault. Quite a bit of comfort comes from Amazon’s successful defenses. It says that D-DOS attacks indeed can be repelled, which

The a purchased viagra generic one nothing able. Has highlighted canada pharmacy online that service do buy accutane online pharmacy in turkey gets antimicrobial products they cialis vs viagra I fine. But not get ed treatment options do I all dark viagra but the any curling… Lock http://www.edtabsonline24h.com/cialis.php for stays easy cialis vs viagra so tea beautiful really cialis review my me cosmetic used viagra price dryer. Cruise the past canadian pharmacy I mesh I off first…

is something that some worry about it—given what seems to be almost unlimited potential resources available to the bad guys.

Put another way, when mighty Amazon can be knocked offline, what hope is there for anyone else? Amazon Cloud—the service it wants other retailers to use—is not nearly as robust as the main site, and Amazon has been somewhat candid about those weaknesses. And there was once a time when Amazon’s defenses were rather ordinary.

And, on the off-chance that Amazon was indeed taken down by criminal hackers, let’s give the E-tailer the kudos it deserves. D-DOS attacks of that size are painful. Keeping the site up is critical, but once the walls fall down, getting them back up can be a huge undertaking. The fact that Amazon got back up in less than 50 minutes is extremely impressive, assuming it was indeed a D-DOS attack.

It’s true but borderline clichéd to say a company that never makes mistakes is nice, but one that properly responds to those mistakes is far better. Keeping your site up during a huge D-DOS assault is nice, but recovering quickly is a lot nicer.


advertisement

One Comment | Read Rivals Hate Amazon, Except During A D-DOS Attack. Retailers Then Are A Band Of HTML Brothers

  1. Bob Skattum Says:

    Excellent point … that getting back up in less than an hour was something of a miracle. Today, 2/1/13 BofA’s online banking site has been down for almost six hours as I type this …

Newsletters

StorefrontBacktalk delivers the latest retail technology news & analysis. Join more than 60,000 retail IT leaders who subscribe to our free weekly email. Sign up today!
advertisement

Most Recent Comments

Why Did Gonzales Hackers Like European Cards So Much Better?

I am still unclear about the core point here-- why higher value of European cards. Supply and demand, yes, makes sense. But the fact that the cards were chip and pin (EMV) should make them less valuable because that demonstrably reduces the ability to use them fraudulently. Did the author mean that the chip and pin cards could be used in a country where EMV is not implemented--the US--and this mis-match make it easier to us them since the issuing banks may not have as robust anti-fraud controls as non-EMV banks because they assumed EMV would do the fraud prevention for them Read more...
Two possible reasons that I can think of and have seen in the past - 1) Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code. 2) Also, in offline chip countries the card determines whether or not a transaction is approved, not the issuer. In my experience, European issuers haven't developed the same checks on authorization requests as US issuers. So, these cards might be more valuable because they are more likely to get approved. Read more...
A smart card slot in terminals doesn't mean there is a reader or that the reader is activated. Then, activated reader or not, the U.S. processors don't have apps certified or ready to load into those terminals to accept and process smart card transactions just yet. Don't get your card(t) before the terminal (horse). Read more...
The marketplace does speak. More fraud capacity translates to higher value for the stolen data. Because nearly 100% of all US transactions are authorized online in real time, we have less fraud regardless of whether the card is Magstripe only or chip and PIn. Hence, $10 prices for US cards vs $25 for the European counterparts. Read more...
@David True. The European cards have both an EMV chip AND a mag stripe. Europeans may generally use the chip for their transactions, but the insecure stripe remains vulnerable to skimming, whether it be from a false front on an ATM or a dishonest waiter with a handheld skimmer. If their stripe is skimmed, the track data can still be cloned and used fraudulently in the United States. If European banks only detect fraud from 9-5 GMT, that might explain why American criminals prefer them over American bank issued cards, who have fraud detection in place 24x7. Read more...

StorefrontBacktalk
Our apologies. Due to legal and security copyright issues, we can't facilitate the printing of Premium Content. If you absolutely need a hard copy, please contact customer service.