During Black Friday, a key time for many e-commerce operators, WEDOS Global Protection demonstrated its ability to effectively protect e-shops from a new wave of cyber attacks. This year during November, we saw a significant increase in short but intense cyber attacks targeting e-shops. Their purpose was to test the resilience of cyber defences. Such a test attack, in the case of non-functioning protection, causes sites to slow down significantly, or even become unavailable for several minutes.

On Black Friday itself, the day of the biggest discounts and shopping frenzy, these attacks picked up in intensity. The longest attack lasted a full hour and was clearly meant to seriously disrupt the store’s operations and limit customers’ access to the tempting offers. At its peak, there were over 1.3 million requests per minute from 1,913 unique IP addresses (this traffic is already adjusted for the most notorious botnets and L3/L4 attacks).

Attacks of this kind, known as L7 DDoS, are particularly insidious because they are disguised as normal Internet traffic. As an example, imagine a single IP address that can serve many different devices (computers, mobile phones) in one location – for example, an entire housing estate. When one of these devices is compromised and misused for an attack, traditional security systems often respond by blocking all activity from that IP address. This can mean that even innocent users trying to visit your store from the same IP address are unfairly blocked.

For example, during one of these attacks, we detected enough activity to block a website from several IP addresses of a popular South Bohemian ISP in one range (which could be a school or a housing estate). At the same time, normal shopping traffic was taking place from other addresses in the same range. Traditional security solutions could block even legitimate e-shop customers in this situation.

However, WEDOS Global Protection offers sophisticated protection that allows you to distinguish between malicious and normal web visitors, even if they come from the same IP address. As a result, e-shops can continue to operate safely and process their customers’ orders during the onslaught of attacks.

This event highlights the importance of advanced security solutions in a digital environment where cyber attacks are an increasing threat and, unfortunately, a cheap way for attackers to harm competitors. WEDOS thus confirms its role as a reliable partner for e-shops, helping to keep their online business running even in the most challenging times.

Contact information:
pr@wedos.com