Herbal affiliate program MensNiche.com was attacked by a hacker this week, which has resulted in downtime and lost profits for both the company and their affiliates.
After being hit with an SYN flood, which was perceived by the company as a possible attempt to obtain information for fraudulent purposes through the MensNiche back-end, the program is taking steps to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again and to repair affiliate relations.
“We are getting back up and running and now we are going to have to spend some money on load balancing,” MensNiche vice president of operations Andrew Slack tells AVNOnline.com. “We had to install a patch and now we are looking at installing some more stuff to stop it from happening again. It’s my job to make sure this does not happen again.”
Although the hacker’s intent is debatable, Slack said affiliates can rest assured that no information was compromised.
“They did not gain access,” he says.
Now, the question becomes what to do to compensate affiliates for the downtime.
“We’ve had both [reactions], but the top affiliates understand,” Slack says. “Most programs would not compensate for this. However, we have spent three years collecting affiliates; we don’t want to lose them over one hacker.”
To that end, MensNiche is asking for suggestions from affiliates. Slack said the company is mulling paying for affiliates’ advertising costs while the site was down, along with some other options.
“We are willing to fairy compensate them for the downtime,” he says.
