Black Friday and the festive season are the biggest shopping events of the year, but busy retailers should take caution not to fall prey to cyber-crime. Between social-engineering, employee manipulation and cybersecurity neglect, businesses run the risk of devastating cyberattacks, as scammers become more sophisticated, and the technology they use more advanced.
“Black Friday presents the perfect opportunity for cybercriminals to steal money, obtain data and gain access to corporate systems unnoticed. This also means gaining consumers’ personal information,” says Reza Joseph, ICT and Network Security Product Manager at Itec South Africa.
For retailers, cyber criminality holds several threats, including phishing emails with fake deals and promotions, which can ruin the business’ reputation among customers. “With the influx of more customer data during Black Friday and festive season events, businesses also become a soft target for data breaches, while the number of payment interception incidents also rise during the period. Businesses should therefore ensure that their payment gateways are secure,” Reza says.
Black Friday also means huge numbers of online traffic, but DDoS attacks can crash business websites, disrupting sales exactly during peak shopping times, devastating what should be a lucrative season. Lastly, free Wi-Fi hotspots in shopping centres pose a huge risk to businesses. “The same features that make free Wi-Fi hotspots desirable for consumers, make them desirable for hackers in that they do not require authentication to establish a network connection. This creates an opportunity for hackers to get unrestricted access to unsecured devices on the same network. For businesses this is a major threat, and by ensuring a secure Wi-Fi, with a firewall, businesses should be able to mitigate the risk considerably.”
