The holidays are the most lucrative time of the year for retailers, and also, unfortunately, for cybercriminals in search of a quick payday.
As shoppers flock online in search of the perfect gift, e-commerce platforms experience unprecedented traffic and sales. However, this surge in activity also creates a perfect storm for cybercriminals, who view the festive rush as a prime opportunity to launch disruptive and damaging attacks. With businesses operating at peak capacity and consumers driven by a sense of urgency, the digital doors are often left wide open to threats. The scale of this challenge is significant; a staggering 80% of retailers have already faced cyberattacks this year, with most experiencing repeated incidents.
As the holidays bear down on us, it’s time for retailers to ramp up security.
How Much Does Cyber Crime Increase During the Holiday Shopping Season?
The holiday shopping season, spanning from Black Friday through the new year, is marked by a dramatic and measurable escalation in malicious cyber activity. Security analysts consistently observe a significant uptick in threats specifically targeting retailers and consumers. This increase is a calculated strategy by threat actors to exploit the unique conditions of the season.
The holiday surge in cyberattacks is fueled by a convergence of factors. The sheer volume of online transactions creates a larger pool of potential targets, allowing malicious activities to blend in with legitimate traffic. Cybercriminals leverage the festive atmosphere and the consumer’s hunt for bargains, crafting sophisticated phishing campaigns disguised as special offers, shipping notifications, or order confirmations. The psychological pressure on shoppers to find deals quickly often leads to lowered vigilance, making them more likely to click on malicious links or provide credentials to fraudulent websites. For attackers, the compressed timeframe of the holiday season provides a high-value, target-rich environment where the potential for financial gain and widespread disruption is at its absolute peak.
Why Do Attackers Target Retail with DDoS During the Holiday Season?
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which overwhelm a website’s servers with a flood of malicious traffic to render it inaccessible, are a particularly popular weapon during the holiday season. Vercara’s Distributed Denial-of-Services (DDoS) mitigation service, UltraDDoS Protect, detected 3,102 DDoS attacks in December 2024, including 7 “mega-attacks” (attacks over 100 Gbps). The size of the attacks in December were substantially larger than in November of 2024. In previous years, Vercara recorded a rise in DDoS attacks during the month of December.
The motivation for launching DDoS attacks against retailers is multifaceted, ranging from simple disruption to complex financial schemes. Unlike data breaches that aim for stealth, a DDoS attack is overt, and its primary goal is to cause maximum operational chaos during a retailer’s most profitable window. The core reasons behind these targeted attacks can be categorized into several key motivations.
Cyber vandalism
In some instances, the motivation behind a DDoS attack is not financial. Instead, it stems from a desire to cause chaos and disruption for its own sake, a practice often referred to as cyber vandalism. These attacks may be launched by “hacktivist” groups aiming to make a political statement against a specific brand or by individuals seeking notoriety within hacking communities. For these actors, successfully taking down a major retailer’s website on a critical shopping day like Black Friday serves as a demonstration of their skills and generates significant attention. The goal is to disrupt business, frustrate customers, and damage the brand’s reputation, proving a point rather than extorting money.
Extortion
Extortion is one of the most common and direct financial motivations for launching a DDoS attack. In this scenario, attackers cripple a retailer’s website and then demand a ransom, typically in cryptocurrency, in exchange for stopping the attack. The timing is strategic; a retailer with an offline e-commerce site is losing thousands of dollars every minute. They are under immense pressure to resolve the issue immediately. This makes them more likely to pay the ransom rather than endure prolonged downtime and revenue loss during a peak sales period. These “Ransom DDoS” (RDDoS) campaigns often begin with a threat and a small-scale demonstration attack, warning the victim of a much larger, sustained assault if the demand is not met.
Business competition
A darker and often underreported motivation for DDoS attacks is anti-competitive business practices. Unscrupulous competitors may anonymously hire DDoS-for-hire services on the dark web to target a rival’s online store during a major promotional event. By knocking a competitor offline, they can directly divert traffic and sales to their own website. This form of industrial sabotage is difficult to trace back to its source, making it a low-risk, high-reward tactic for businesses willing to engage in unethical and illegal strategies to gain a market advantage during the fiercely competitive holiday season. Competitors may also use bots to scrape prices or inventory information from e-commerce sites.
What Are Common Holiday Cybersecurity Challenges that Retailers Face?
Beyond the external threats, retailers also grapple with a set of internal and operational challenges during the holidays that can significantly heighten their cybersecurity risk. These challenges strain resources and create vulnerabilities that sophisticated attackers are quick to exploit.
Reduced Staffing
The holiday season is a popular time for employees to take vacations, and this often includes key personnel within IT and cybersecurity teams. Operating with a skeleton crew means that security monitoring may be less rigorous, and the ability to respond to a detected incident is significantly delayed. A smaller team is more easily overwhelmed, extending the critical window between the start of an attack and its mitigation. This reduced capacity gives attackers a crucial advantage, allowing them more time to escalate their attack or achieve their objectives before an effective defense can be mounted.
Network Traffic Spikes
Massive sales events like Cyber Monday generate enormous spikes in legitimate website traffic. While this is a positive sign for business, it creates a significant challenge for security monitoring. The flood of genuine customer activity can effectively mask the initial stages of a DDoS attack or other malicious traffic. Automated security systems may struggle to differentiate between a legitimate surge in shoppers and a coordinated botnet assault. This noise makes anomaly detection more difficult, delaying the identification of a threat until it has already reached a critical, service-disrupting scale.
Distracted Employees
The high-pressure environment of the holiday rush affects all employees, not just the security team. Customer service, logistics, and marketing departments are working at maximum capacity to handle orders and inquiries. This widespread distraction and stress make staff more vulnerable to social engineering tactics. An employee focused on resolving customer issues may be less likely to scrutinize an email for signs of phishing. As phishing was the vector in 38% of attacks against the retail industry, this human factor represents a critical weak link that can provide attackers with the initial foothold needed to compromise the entire network.
What Impact Does a DDoS Attack Have?
The consequences of a successful DDoS attack during the holiday season extend far beyond a temporarily unavailable website. The financial, operational, and reputational damage can be severe and long-lasting, undermining a retailer’s success for the entire year.
1. Website Downtime
The most immediate and obvious impact of a DDoS attack is website downtime. For an online retailer, the website is the storefront, cash register, and customer service desk all in one. Every minute it remains offline during a peak shopping period translates directly into lost sales. The potential for revenue loss is astronomical, as shoppers will quickly abandon a non-responsive site and take their business to a competitor, often permanently.
2. Server and Hosting Issues
A sustained, high-volume DDoS attack places immense strain on a company’s IT infrastructure. Servers can be overwhelmed, leading to system crashes, data corruption, and even physical hardware damage. Furthermore, the flood of malicious traffic can trigger automated defenses from hosting providers or internet service providers, who may block all traffic to the targeted site, including legitimate customers, to protect the stability of their broader network. This can prolong an outage even after the attack itself has subsided.
3. Website Vulnerability
Sophisticated cybercriminals often use DDoS attacks as a strategic diversion. While the IT and security teams are entirely focused on restoring service, attackers may be simultaneously exploiting other, less obvious vulnerabilities to infiltrate the network. This smokescreen provides cover for more insidious activities, such as data exfiltration, malware installation, or credential theft. The retail sector is a prime target, accounting for 11% of cybersecurity incidents in 2023, and a DDoS attack can be the perfect distraction for a deeper breach.
4. Lost Time and Money
The total cost of a DDoS attack is a combination of direct and indirect damages. Beyond the immediate lost revenue, there are costs associated with IT overtime, incident response consultants, and potential regulatory fines if customer data is compromised. According to recent data, the average cost of a breach in retail now stands at $3.48 million. Perhaps the most damaging effect of a breach is the erosion of customer trust. A bad shopping experience can permanently tarnish a brand’s reputation, an issue compounded by the fact that 62% of consumers say they are not confident regarding the security of their data.
Best Practices for Mitigating DDoS Attack Risk
Given the severe consequences, a proactive and multi-layered approach to cybersecurity is essential for retailers. Mitigating the risk of DDoS and other holiday threats requires a combination of robust technology, strategic planning, and human vigilance.
First, retailers must invest in a resilient technical infrastructure. This includes implementing a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to filter malicious traffic and utilizing a dedicated, cloud-based DDoS mitigation service. These services can absorb and scrub massive volumes of malicious traffic before it ever reaches the retailer’s servers. With the retail industry facing an average of 5,570 API attacks daily, securing APIs is equally critical.
Second, developing and testing a comprehensive incident response plan is non-negotiable. This plan should clearly outline roles, responsibilities, and communication protocols for when an attack occurs. Knowing who to call and what steps to take in the first crucial minutes can significantly reduce the duration and impact of an incident. This plan should be tested regularly through drills and simulations, especially in the lead-up to the holiday season.
Finally, the human element cannot be overlooked. Ongoing security awareness training for all employees is vital. Staff should be educated on how to identify phishing emails, verify suspicious requests, and report potential threats. Fostering a security-conscious culture turns every employee into a part of the defense, creating a human firewall that complements technological safeguards.
Build Resilience Before the Holiday Rush Begins
Retailers can’t afford to rely on hope when it comes to security, especially during the holidays, when DDoS, bot, and application-layer attacks spike. Vercara’s UltraDDoS Protect and UltraWAF solutions deliver enterprise-grade protection that keeps e-commerce platforms online, fast, and secure during the year’s most critical sales period.
With a global, high-capacity mitigation network and real-time threat intelligence, Vercara ensures your website stays resilient even under pressure protecting your customers, your revenue, and your reputation during the busiest time of the year.
This holiday season, don’t let cybercriminals steal your momentum. Strengthen your defenses today with Vercara’s proven cloud-based security solutions. Learn more at vercara.com.
