A week of casino ads
For a week the website redirected its visitors to casino sites. It was a customer who noticed.
Friday evening, “Update all”
One click on “Update all”, and after that the website showed nothing but “There has been a critical error.”
The checkout that listens in
For weeks, card details were skimmed at checkout. It was the bank that reported it.
The full disk
For two days the store took no orders. The disk was full, and nobody noticed.
The host switches PHP versions
The host raised the PHP version. For three days the home page looked empty.
The checkout that is only broken sometimes
For three weeks, not a single purchase on invoice went through in the store for wholesale customers. The main store worked perfectly.
The agency was on the server
For a promotion, an outside agency changed files directly on the server. With the next update, the promotion was gone.
Nobody did it
After a new feature went in, the product search found nothing anymore. Nobody knew who had changed what.
A thousand pages nobody wrote
Google suddenly showed thousands of pages with Japanese ads for the company website.
The test email to every customer
While the new newsletter was being tested, 4,000 real customers received an email saying “Test Test”.
The backup that came too late
The website had been infected for three weeks. The host’s backups went back seven days.
The big update without a rehearsal
The Shopware major update ran on Sunday. On Monday the store accepted no payments.
A typical course of events, assembled from real incidents. Figures are example calculations based on the stated assumptions.
How the figures are calculated.
Each case study is a typical course of events, assembled from documented incidents and industry figures, not the story of one of my clients. The costs are ranges with open assumptions, so you can recalculate them with your own figures.
- 01Developer €90 to €120/h, Shopware agency €110 to €130/h, weekend and emergency surcharge +50%.
- 02Fixed-price malware cleanup of a WordPress website: €300 to €800 (offers in Germany from €249).
- 03Initial forensic analysis by outside specialists: €3,000 to €8,000 (ballpark figures).
- 04Lawyer or data protection officer: €150 to €250/h.
- 05Your own staff’s time: €50/h.
- 06Lost sales: annual online revenue ÷ 365 per day, ×1.5 to 2 in peak season. Example store: €300,000 a year, about €820 on an average day.