A coffee company had one of its worst nightmares become a reality just as the holiday season began. After noticing something was amiss with its website on Black Friday—perhaps the single-largest shopping day of the year in the United States — the company asked its IT firm to look into the matter. The following day, the company contacted Coalition.

The IT firm determined the coffee company was experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A threat actor flooded the company’s website with visitors to disrupt operations and, presumably, to leverage the attack into a ransom payment. However, a ransom was never demanded, and the attack ceased after three days.

Interestingly, the DDoS attack paused between midnight and 6 a.m. every day, but the coffee company still suffered nearly three days of interrupted sales during one of the busiest weekends of the year. By comparing prior years of Black Friday weekends, we were able to work with the company and estimate how much money it lost as a result of the DDoS attack.

Here’s how key coverages came into play for this claim: Breach Response covered the cost of breach counsel and a forensics investigation. Business Interruption coverage covered the lost revenue and extra expenses for data and site restoration. After the coffee company paid its $10,000 self-insured retention, its policy covered the remaining $188,000.