The 2024 holiday season is here. Retailers have been prepping for this season all year and are ready to provide a safe, secure, and seamless customer shopping experience.

According to the National Retail Federation (NFR), retail sales during 2024 will grow between 2.5% and 3.5% from 2023 to between $5.23 trillion and $5.28 trillion. In preparation for fluctuating consumer demand and competitive pressures, retailers must continuously innovate to meet customers’ needs, provide exceptional shopping experiences, and drive customer engagement and retention.

Merchants are well aware that shoppers are becoming more intentional about their holiday spending and cautious about where they shop. Consumers are guarding their privacy more than ever. Any operational downtime or even worse data loss due to a data breach could significantly impact customer loyalty and their highly anticipated holiday season revenues.

During the holiday season, retailers experience a significant surge in transactions, both online and in-store. This flux creates a prime opportunity for cybercriminals to target sensitive customer information. Vendors’ attention is increasingly fragmented across various data-collecting and transactional platforms. As if things were not difficult enough, data collection in more states and countries is becoming stricter, with increased consumer protection laws leaving retailers applying tighter data privacy to their digital platforms.

To stay agile and maximize every sales opportunity, retailers rely on third-party cloud-managed computing environments and third-party SaaS services to enable real-time access to data, facilitate operational monitoring, and improve the efficiency of store management. Cloud technology has significantly transformed the retail industry, addressing various business needs such as reducing infrastructure costs, and managing resources. Cloud services offer security mechanisms to protect against cyber threats, however, data security challenges in the cloud remain relevant and require special attention. Retailers are very familiar with the risks and consequences of data breaches, with attacks occurring as far back as a decade ago and continuing to target retailers to this day.

According to a recent study, the average cost of a retail data breach in 2024 is reported to be $3.48 million, representing an 18% increase compared to the previous year in 2023. The 18% increase from 2023 is likely due to factors such as rising business disruption costs, post-breach response expenses, and regulatory fines.¹

The industry is seeing data breaches becoming more common and severe, with attackers adopting approaches that maximize their impact, leading to higher recovery costs. Cybercriminals are using sophisticated tactics, including AI-driven attacks, to exploit weaknesses that necessitate businesses to invest in advanced protection mechanisms and incident response capabilities to counteract these threats.

The human element risk cannot be understated.

In 2023, 74% of all breaches include the human element, meaning people were involved through mistakes, misuse of privileges, use of stolen credentials, or social engineering tactics. 83% of breaches involved external actors, and the primary motivation for attacks continues to be overwhelmingly financially driven, at 95% of breaches. source: 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report Retail Snapshot

Protecting credit card data

Retailers handling credit and debit card transactions must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This includes requirements for secure processing, storage, and transmission of cardholder data. Retailers must prioritize the protection of sensitive customer data, including credit card information, across all systems—from physical stores to back-end processing. Achieving PCI compliance is essential. This season, the motivation for enhancing data security and improving compliance is driven by the new requirements of PCI 4.0. Retailers may need to undergo additional audits and assessments to ensure compliance with data protection laws and regulations.

Supply chain attacks

Retailers are part of a complex global supply chain, where breaches at suppliers can also impact their operations. In these attacks, cyber criminals target vulnerable third-party suppliers or partners to gain access to a retailer’s systems. The supply chains can be thrown into chaos, leading to production delays and lost revenue during the peak shopping season. Since retailers often rely on a complex web of suppliers, a breach at one supplier can have a cascading effect across the entire shopping and supply line. If the supplier is temporarily unable to fulfill orders due to a breach, this can halt production and lead to stock shortages, impacting retailers’ ability to meet customer demand. Retailers may be prompted to reevaluate their supplier relationships, increasing scrutiny of their security practices to assess overall supply chain resilience.

Interconnectedness of systems

Interconnectedness makes the retail sector particularly susceptible to large-scale attacks. The increasing interconnectedness of systems due to the digitalized environment has greatly expanded the attack surface. IoT devices and connected systems allow for real-time monitoring and control, but they also introduce vulnerabilities if not properly secured. This blurring of the lines between IT and OT makes it easier for attackers to infiltrate systems and cause widespread disruption. This interconnected risk elevates overall costs as comprehensive security measures involve multiple stakeholders.

Organizations must prioritize understanding their interconnected systems. IT and security teams must regularly update security measures, conduct risk assessments, and adopt a proactive and layered security approach to minimize vulnerabilities. Retailers can better mitigate the potential impacts of data breaches by proactively addressing these risks through strong supplier management, effective communication, and security training.

Ransomware attacks

In today’s hostile cybercrime environment, baseline security measures are not enough to guard your business against zero-day ransomware attacks. Retailers must safeguard their critical business assets with a multi-layered security approach that includes active monitoring, advanced data protection, and dependable remediation.

As reported in the 2024 Thales Data Threat Report, ransomware attacks are more common with 28% of survey takers experiencing an attack (up from 22% last year).

As cybercriminals adopt increasingly sophisticated tactics, it is essential to invest in advanced protection measures and incident response capabilities. This will help counteract threats effectively. Following a structured detection and response plan is crucial to mitigate damage and ensure a successful recovery.

Thales Data Security Solutions for Retail

Gain complete visibility

Thales data security solutions provide unified visibility into all data repositories that are part of the organization’s architecture. This includes legacy repositories deep in the architecture and new ones, in on-premises and cloud-managed environments. Even data repositories that you don’t know exist yet. When you have that level of visibility, you can evaluate vulnerabilities, figure out who should have privileged access to the repositories and why, and then optimize your detection and response process to deal with potential breaches.

Optimize staff and resource efficiency

Thales delivers the broadest support of data security for retail use cases with products designed to work together, a single line to global support, a proven track record protecting from evolving threats, and the largest ecosystem of data security partnerships in the industry. Thales solutions provide ease of use, APIs for automation, and responsive teams to support your staff quickly deploy, secure, and monitor the protection of your business. In addition, our Professional Services and partners are available for design, implementation, and training assistance to ensure fast and reliable implementations with the least amount of your staff’s time.

Reduce total cost of ownership

The Thales delivers a comprehensive set of data security solutions and capabilities that easily scale and expand into new use cases. With Thales, you can future-proof your investments while reducing operational costs and capital expenditures.

Fine-tuning data security capabilities

Thales enables retailers to improve competitive advantages by accelerating transformation while reducing risk of data breach, complexity, and cost.

Shop Securely this Holiday Season

The combination of regulatory pressures, technological advancements, and a challenging threat landscape significantly increases the costs for retailers to prevent data breaches. To manage these expenses, retailers need to take a proactive approach to cybersecurity, focusing on data visibility, threat prevention, and risk management. This holiday season, keep in mind that improving your data security can enhance the post-holiday purchasing experience, leading to better customer retention, repeat business, and brand advocacy.

¹ 2024 IBM “Cost of a Data Breach Report

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