PayPal lost £3.5 million as a result of a string of attacks, a court has been told.
The PayPal blog was taken offline on December 6 as a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, but 22-year-old Christopher Weatherhead is charged with continuing the attacks from December 8 to December 17.
In order to protect itself from future attacks, PayPal was reportedly forced to invest in new software and hardware. In addition, 104 employees from eBay’s parent company were borrowed by PayPal to assist with incident cleanup. In a BBC report, PayPal said it also misplaced transactions during the attacks.
A cyber attacker, according to prosecutor Sandip Patel, Weatherhead “waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks that paralyzed a series of targeted computer systems belonging to companies with which they took issue, for whatever reason, and those attacks caused unprecedented harm.”
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The cost claims are interesting because PayPal wasn’t hacked; while members of Anonymous have successfully hacked organizations, they typically stick to DDoS attacks.
Director of security research for Trend Micro, Rik Ferguson, stated, “I can’t help but agree that’s more than 100 people’ working for three weeks to solve seems excessive. “I can only assume that they are including absolutely everyone who had any involvement at all, not just in mitigating the attacks at the time but also in planning any future architectural changes, making purchasing decisions, and even raising purchase orders – which of course is justifiable in terms of calculating the cost of an attack overall,” the author says.
A DDoS attack, he continued, “can actually result in a varying amount of damage depending on the victim and how they conduct business.” Since Paypal’s entire business is conducted online, it stands to reason that a DDoS attack would have a significant financial impact.
The court was not informed of the costs incurred by MasterCard or Visa as a result of similar attacks, which were also a part of Anonymous’ so-called Operation Payback, but it was informed that previous actions against the BPI cost the lobby organization £3,996 and Ministry of Sound £9,000.
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