First online companies had to assure the public that credit-card and other financial transactions over the Internet would be secure. Then came questions about privacy. Now dot.com sites have a new problem to combat: hackers preventing others from accessing their sites.
After three days of attacks on popular websites by hackers, industry experts said that online companies must develop plans to continue operations when faced with cyber attacks.
"I think the dot.com companies will learn from this very quickly," said Mr Jeffrey Johnson, president and chief executive of META Secure E-Com Solutions, an Atlanta-based online security company. "People who do their trading or buy online . . . might think twice about giving their credit-card numbers."
Many online ventures have grown so quickly and have been having such tremendous online traffic that they haven't developed alternative plans to take phone orders or shift their Web businesses to back up computers if their main sites went down.
"Many Web ventures haven't had back-up plans," said Mr Cormac Foster, analyst at New York's Jupiter Communications. "All they think is `We'll get back up as soon as we can'."
The problem began on Monday when the online directory Yahoo! Inc.site was blocked for about three hours. Some of the other best-known Internet brand names that have taken great pains to make sure they would always be up and running fell victim to the hackers, including online auction site e-Bay and Buy.com, the online retailer that just had a public stock offering.
"These are sites that are usually under excellent performance," said Mr Eric Siegel, a senior Internet consultant at Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks availability of online sites by having 100 computers around the world continuously trying to access websites.
Several sites affected said they did not expect these hacks to hurt their revenues. For instance, Yahoo! officials said the company builds in enough extra ad time for advertisers to compensate for the times when their website may not be available during the 465 million times its site is accessed daily.
But even though most companies may not suffer financially since their websites were down for only a few hours, the public may start questioning whether the Internet is a reliable way to transact business.
Content sites such as Yahoo! and CNN may be able to be down for a couple of hours without losing too much business, but online stock traders whose portfolios can be hurt by even a few minutes' delay are likely to be less forgiving.
But even if website companies switched temporarily to doing things manually, they would quickly find that they did not have the manpower. For instance, Yahoo!, a company whose stock is worth nearly twice as much as General Motors, has fewer than 2,000 employees; eBay, the online auction site, has just 130 people.
The hackers also targeted some of the most security-savvy companies on line, which means lesser-known companies that haven't spent as much on security could be taken down even quicker, said Ms Allison Taylor, director of PGP Security Products, a division of Network Associates, based in Santa Clara, California.
"You've got all these companies doing business online and they're doing it with a lot of money," Ms Taylor said. "For a hacker, that's really tempting."
But online users also need to learn from the hacks this week, said Mr Foster of Jupiter. If a consumer needs something three weeks from now, he shouldn't wait until three days before to order it. And, consumers should keep toll-free phone numbers handy for online brokers, banks or other critical transactions just in case they don't have access to those companies on the Internet.
