Leader: WorldPay security wake-up call

Online payment service WorldPay admitted today it is still struggling to fend of a "massive and sustained" denial of service attack on its systems that has hit its payment services to customers.

The attack has been going on for at least two days now without any sign of letting up and it highlights some serious security issues and the importance of business continuity planning.

It shows that just securing systems is only one part of any equation. WorldPay's systems haven't actually been hacked or compromised here, yet its business has been severely hit, with consequences for its customers who rely on the payment service to process internet-based card transactions. And that's not to mention the publicity, which it could have done without.

This highlights the growing menace of denial of service (DoS) attacks on ordinary businesses. DoS attacks are nothing new but they are relatively easy for even inexperienced hackers and script kiddies to execute. Just last week silicon.com warned how businesses are getting unwittingly caught in the crossfire of hackers in chatrooms launching DoS attacks on each other.

Many in law enforcement and the security industry have lobbied for changes to the Computer Misuse Act that would more clearly define DoS crimes, along with harder penalties that reflect the financial and reputational damage they can cause to a company. But that's a topic for another day.

Ultimately, this comes down to business continuity planning. There are no specific details yet on the actual volume of traffic generated by the DoS attack on WorldPay or it's own contingency plans but we'd wager its customers, those who rely on the service, will be asking tough questions about why the company wasn't able to more easily use back-up systems that would have absorbed the attack and kept the service up and running.

Keeping systems patched and protected is a thankless task for the IT department but incidents like this should act as a timely reminder: if you take your eye off the ball for just a minute, you may not have a business anymore.