Boardriders Inc., the owner of iconic surfing brands Billabong and Quicksilver, has been targeted in a cyberattack in what is likely the first of many in the lead-up to the holiday shopping season.

The company was targeted two weeks ago by unknown hackers with malware that crippled its international operations, information technology systems, communications, and sales and distribution networks. The form of the attack was not specified, but it resulted in outages that caused delays in shipping merchandise to customers.

“Recently, Boardriders Inc. was exposed to an increasingly common computer virus that impacted some of our systems in some regions,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “Our IT teams have been working to quickly restore our systems to support our operations, which are now largely transacting and shipping normally.”

The attack sounds like it used ransomware given that systems were crippled. If it was, it’s yet another ransomware attack in a year of nearly daily reports of them.

Noting that it’s a sign of things to come, Ilia Kolochenko, founder and chief executive officer of web security company ImmuniWeb, told SiliconANGLE that pre-holiday attacks against retailers and e-commerces will likely spike by the end of this year.

“In light of a steady growth of targeted [and successful] ransomware attacks, both in terms of quality and quantity, victims are particularly susceptible to extortion and will almost certainly pay ransom during the hottest sales days of the year,” Kolochenko said. “A lot of organizations underestimate and disregard how many of their corporate passwords are available for sale in the dark web. Attackers are well aware of this low-hanging fruit and run overly successful password reuse and spear-phishing campaigns. Worse, such attacks are pretty complicated to detect and often remain unnoticed by the victims.”

He added that “holistic visibility of your digital assets, continuous security and anomaly monitoring combined with a third-party risk management can negate most common attack vectors deployed by cybercriminals in a modern threat landscape.” As for customers, Kolochenko said, they should be “cautious to any abnormal activities, ignore offers that are too good to be true and preferably have a dedicated credit card for e-shopping with alerts by SMS about every transaction.”

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