Diane knows beer. People travel from hours away to visit her store, which carries a dizzying array of hard to find brews from all corners of the globe. When she saw how far people were willing to go to get to her store, Diane decided to bring her store to them - through cyberspace.
Within a few months the online store accounted for almost one third of Diane's total sales. One week, however, her online orders mysteriously dropped. No one was ordering from the Web site. When she checked the site, Diane discovered that someone had exploited a flaw in the site's code to deface the front page. "It was like someone took a brick and threw it through my windows, then spray painted all over my walls. I was devastated."
Her site was down for a total of 13 days, during which Diane lost thousands of dollars in revenue. After the site went back online, she found many former customers had lost confidence in the security of their personal information and gone elsewhere to shop. It took nearly a year for sales at the online store to return to pre-defacement levels. Since the incident, Diane has switched Web developers. Now she uses an established technology firm with a strong reputation for developing secure Web applications.
To learn how to protect your Web site from intrusions, see Web Publishing - Intrusions
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