Volume 8 - Issue 4
Comparing Alternatives to Measure the Impact of DDoS Attack Announcements on Target Stock Prices
- Abhishta
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
s.abhishta@utwente.nl
- Reinoud Joosten
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
r.a.m.g.joosten@utwente.nl
- Lambert J.M. Nieuwenhuis
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
l.j.m.nieuwenhuis@utwente.nl
Keywords: DDoS attacks, stock market study, event study, economic impact.
Abstract
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are responsible for creating unavailability of online resources.
Botnets based on internet of things (IOT) devices are now being used to conduct DDoS
attacks. The estimation of direct and indirect economic damages caused by these attacks is a complex
problem. In this article we analyze the impact of 45 different DDoS attack announcements on
victim firm’s stock prices using three different approaches and compare the results. We show that the
assumption of cumulative abnormal returns being normally distributed leads to overestimation/underestimation
of the impact. We solve this problem by using an empirical distribution of cumulative
abnormal returns for hypothesis testing. Finally, we demonstrate the impact of DDoS attack announcements
in each of the cases.