The biggest takeaway you can get from analyzing the current, evolving cyberthreat landscape is that attacks can cost you a lot of time and resources if left unmitigated or mismanaged.
In 2025 alone, chargeback fraud cost businesses over $33.7 billion worldwide.
Moreover, with widening attack surfaces and increasing volume of vulnerable data, even DoS (Denial of Service) attacks have become more frequent, affecting websites and even business operations in many organizations. The fallout from chargeback fraud and DoS attacks can be quite huge and affect your business performance and efficiency significantly.
That said, understanding what these threats mean for your business and how they can hamper your operations is imperative before you find and implement ways to prevent or resolve them.
Understanding Chargeback Fraud and DoS Attacks
Chargeback fraud, also known as “friendly fraud,” refers to instances where customers attempt to dispute legitimate orders and transactions solely to reverse the payments. Chargeback fraud results from dishonest claims and loopholes in payment terms and conditions.
Some of the common scenarios that can lead to chargeback fraud include:
Nondelivery claims
Claims of damages or a mismatch with the description
Unauthorized use or broken seal claims
While chargeback issues can often result from genuine confusion or poor customer experience, however, these claims can also be deliberately deceptive and cause fraud.
On the other hand, DoS attacks are highly disruptive to your payment and website systems as they involve overwhelming your systems with malicious traffic or making parts of your website inaccessible. A DoS attack is a common type of cyber threat that can degrade user trust in the case of service outages and even payment failures.
As a result, organizations, especially those dealing with online transactions, must consider implementing different types of network security to prevent modern cyber threats and attacks from disrupting operations.
How to Identify and Prevent Chargeback Fraud and DoS Attacks?
You must prepare your website security and double down on your adaptability and vigilance, so that you can effectively navigate DoS attacks and chargeback fraud. It is important for organizations to check for any early warning signs so that they can proactively prevent any reputational and financial damage.
Chargeback fraud has a very recognizable pattern that may not immediately be visible to an untrained eye, but once you develop a keen eye, that pattern is easily identifiable. On the other hand, DoS attacks display plenty of warning signs, such as abnormal traffic surges or unignorably slower website performance.
Here are some of the tell-tale signs of chargeback fraud and DoS attacks that you should keep a check on, when making your business more cyber resilient:
Unusually high chargeback rates within a suspiciously short duration or time frame, especially after a major sales event on your website
Irregularities and deviations in purchase behaviors, such as mismatched billing and shipping addresses, and rapid-fire transactions
Receiving numerous complaints from the same IP range, sometimes paired with chargeback or refund requests
Best Practices For Preventing Fraud and DoS Attacks
Now that we have a working understanding of DoS attacks and chargeback fraud, here are some of the best practices you should consider implementing:
Implementing modern AI and ML-powered tools can help analyze customer behavior and proactively flag risky transactions
Enhancing customer communication with the help of clear receipts, documentation, and transparent return/refund policies
Keeping email correspondence, IP logs, and delivery receipts so that you always have access to irrefutable evidence for payment disputes
Update your list of suspicious users, email addresses, and shipping destinations regularly based on your analysis of past fraud patterns
4 Effective Strategies To Defend Your Systems Against a DoS Attack
Now that we have navigated the basics of chargeback fraud and DoS attacks, let us talk about defense measures you can implement against DoS attacks. DoS attacks, when unmitigated or stopped, can cause major losses for your operational efficiency and business.
With that in mind, here are some of the best technical strategies you can consider implementing to effectively prevent DoS attacks:
1. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)
Implementing WAFs can help shield your website from malicious traffic by filtering and blocking any unverified requests. As a result, such requests never reach your payment applications, and common threats such as SQL injections and cross-site scripting are effectively prevented. Modern WAFs can be deployed on the cloud or on premises, and offer more scalable protection and real-time updates against sophisticated and modern attack methods.
2. DDoS Mitigation Services
Companies like Cloudflare and Akamai provide DDoS mitigation services that can help you redirect your website traffic through scrubbing centers that filter out any attack traffic proactively. Such services utilize advanced algorithms to differentiate between malicious and legitimate requests, and can even help you seamlessly prevent volumetric attacks. You can even customize and tweak your protection measures from the highly accessible, real-time dashboard.
3. Intrusion Detection & Prevention Systems
IDS and IPS systems specialize in monitoring your network traffic so that you can effectively spot any signs of DoS attacks and take preventive measures. Such systems are great at identifying attack signatures, brute-force surges, and traffic anomalies, and triggering alerts to block any harmful traffic. You can even integrate these systems with your other network and data security tools to improve your defense posture.
4. Geo-Blocking
If you have a history of malicious traffic coming in from a specific region or location, you can restrict access to your payment services using geo-blockers. Implementing this strategy can help you not only decrease your attack surface but also make it more difficult for cybercriminals to launch a widespread attack. Most businesses implement geo-blocking as a way to reduce the negative impacts of a DoS attack and re-enable access as soon as the threat fades away.
Concluding Remarks
With the escalating threats posed by DoS attacks and online payment fraud, high-profile and disruptive DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common.
Organizations must adopt a multi-layered approach that combines technical defense and customer engagement to proactively prevent and mitigate threats. Once the necessary measures are implemented, you must also establish continuous monitoring to assess the crisis readiness of your organization in case of a threat.