To most of us the Internet seems like the wild wild west and although there is no such thing as cattle rustling it does at times seem possible. The bad guys are roaming around as individuals or grouped together as gangs and they are attacking everything and anything that they can.
Your web site or E-commerce site can be brought down on a whim through either a concerted DDOS from someone or something you have upset or by accident when you have posted a special that everyone wants.
For a small or medium business or not for profit organisation website downtime could be less than an inconvenience. But damage to reputation and revenue could be devastation. If your website if doing $100,000 per month the loss of a single day could impact your bottom line significantly.
When dealing with most disaster recovery scenarios power outages, virus infections, human error and natural disasters are what most decision makers think about. A DDOS attack is not usually thought about in the same terms but a sustained DDOS attack of 24 – 48 hours could have serious implications for an E-commerce site.
The potential risk to a business from an Internet attack could well be significant in both reputation and financial. When creating your disaster recovery plan make sure that these areas of the business are also included.