The iPremier Company: Denial of Service Attack

1. Company overview

The iPremier is Web-based Commerce Company and established in 1996 by two founder students from Swarthmore College. The company is one of the top two retail businesses in online transaction which selling from vintage goods and to the luxury item.

Its well knows that during fiscal year 2006, iPremier has grabbed profit $2.1 millions with sales of $32 million from their high-end customer. The company has also recorded with growth by 20% annually for the last three years consecutive sales whereas back in late 1998, the company’s history of stock price had nearly tripled, especially when the euphoria of the 1999, which the market is rose to tripling, prices. Its
emergency procedure and business continuity plan in ordered but misplaced due to in proper filing.

There are few items highlighted from the case;

o No crisis management strategy which means there is no emergency procedure in motion being set for business continuity plan whereby the current business operation standard is not in proper binder and out of date from the current use of technology

o No disaster recovery plans in place o Too much reliance on outsourcing o Never practice incident response o External factor that indirectly affect to company

Q-2: What should they have done differently, before or during the event?

Before: o iPremier should have chosen a better Internet Hosting business with better firewalls (software and hardware) - be accessible 24/7, have their own technical support, keep logs of events, do regular system updates and backups. o Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) in case of DoS attacks (as well as other technical problems), and have emergency response team ready to execute it as soon as possible. PR SOP for every crisis scenarios, and the PR team should have prepared statements ready within the first couple of hours o Engaged the help of external Tiger Team to test its systems and external audit company to do a security audit

During the event: o Follow suggestion by Joanne Ripley to disconnect all production computers and rebuild from scratch. They