Analysing The Impact Of A DDoS Attack Announcement On Victim Stock Prices
This addresses the financial consequences of cyberattacks for firms and investors, but it is incremental as it applies an existing event study method with a distributional adjustment.
The study analyzed the impact of DDoS attack announcements on victim firms' stock prices over 5 years, finding no significant effect in most cases but a significant negative impact when attacks caused service interruptions.
DDoS attacks are increasingly used by `hackers' and `hacktivists' for various purposes. A number of on-line tools are available to launch an attack of significant intensity. These attacks lead to a variety of losses at the victim's end. We analyse the impact of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack announcements over a period of 5 years on the stock prices of the victim firms. We propose a method for event studies that does not assume the cumulative abnormal returns to be normally distributed, instead we use the empirical distribution for testing purposes. In most cases we find no significant impact on the stock returns but in cases where a DDoS attack creates an interruption in the services provided to the customer, we find a significant negative impact.