The Reaction Time to Web Site Defacements

Abstract # ↰

Web site defacement has become a common threat for organizations exposed on the web. There exist several statistics that indicate the number of incidents of this sort but there is a crucial piece of information still lacking: the typical duration of a defacement. Clearly, a defacement lasting one week is much more harmful than one of few minutes. In this paper we present the results of a two months monitoring activity that we performed over more than 62000 defacements in order to figure out whether and when a reaction to the defacement is taken. We show that such time tends to be unacceptably long—in the order of several days—and with a long-tailed distribution. We believe our findings may improve the understanding of this phenomenon and highlight issues deserving attention by the research community.