Online shopping for the November and December holiday season is expected to total nearly $210 billion as savvy shoppers take advantage of early Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. Retailers and cyber criminals share one thing in common during this time of year—the holiday season is when they generate the most revenue. Now is a great time to remind your clients to be extra vigilant in their cybersecurity and extra nice to their IT teams who are working around the clock to keep their businesses humming while managing web spikes, and keeping an eye out for new, holiday-themed threats. 

While making significant changes to your retail clients’ security programs or implementing new technology might not be possible with the shopping season already underway, you can still work with existing resources to predict threats better and prevent disruption.

For retail customers who are introducing new digital experiences for their shoppers, it’s essential to gain visibility and control over their potential attack surface, quickly patch vulnerabilities, mitigate any potential attack methods and implement strong API security. Additionally, your retail customers can benefit from a comprehensive cloud visibility solution that provides an easy-to-use dashboard for monitoring workloads across multiple clouds.

Some of your retail customers may have invested in AI-assisted ordering kiosks or tablet-based Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems for shoppers to browse, order and buy products more efficiently. While these innovations can enhance the customer experience, they also require more security controls.  

Consider implementing next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), Wi-Fi and wired access and secure SD-WAN solutions to consolidate and converge your clients’ networks. When deployed as part of a comprehensive SD-Branch solution, this combination of technology scales quickly and enables those bandwidth-intensive “always on” applications and technologies to operate consistently and securely.

Last year, we identified several fake websites that surfaced early in the holiday shopping season. A Digital Risk Protection Service (DRPS), can help prevent these types of attacks by providing proactive monitoring and risk analysis of your client's digital brand assets.

Following these steps can help ensure your retail customers enjoy a happy, profitable holiday season!

Find out more about how Fortinet protects retailers against cyberattacks and threats to help retailers secure digital transformation initiatives.