For an e-commerce retailer doing $100,000/hour in peak sales, a 2-hour DDoS attack isn't just a technical problem — it's a $200,000 direct revenue loss, plus brand damage, SEO impact from crawl failures, and customer trust erosion that's harder to quantify.
When Attacks Happen
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday — attack frequency spikes 300–500% vs baseline.
- Flash sale launches — competitors or extortionists time attacks to your marketing calendar.
- Peak checkout windows — even a 5-minute outage during a limited-time promotion is devastating.
- Post-dispute retaliation — unhappy vendors or customers with technical knowledge.
What Attackers Target
Smart attackers don't just flood bandwidth — they target your most expensive endpoints. Product search APIs, cart operations, checkout flows, and payment gateway callbacks all hit your database. An HTTP flood targeting /search?q= with unique query strings bypasses your CDN cache and hammers your backend on every request.
Protection Strategy
- Route all traffic through Akarguard's scrubbing proxy via DNS — same setup regardless of traffic volume.
- Cache static pages and product listings at the proxy layer — attack traffic hits cache, not your origin.
- Rate-limit cart and checkout endpoints per session — normal users don't checkout 200 times per minute.
- Keep your origin server IP private — never exposed in emails, order confirmations, or error pages.
Pre-event checklist
Before every major sale: verify DNS is pointing to Akarguard, confirm origin IP isn't exposed, test your WAF rules against your own promotional URLs, and brief your on-call team on the DDoS response runbook.