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In recent years, retailers have been forced to be more agile, responding rapidly to quickly changing business landscapes and consumer expectations. Retailers rushed to bring curbside and home delivery services to market and send their knowledge workers home in some hybrid capacity from the headquarters and contact center. Frequently, security took a back seat to the urgency of business needs and that led to spikes in cybercrime against retailers.
Many transactions involve not just payment card information, but some level of personal customer data. Retailers leverage advanced analytic tools to gather information on customer behavior, both online and in-store, allowing retailers to optimize product assortment, placement, and pricing in-store to drive increased margins and serve customers better.
So, how do retailers go about protecting the data they now rely on? By ensuring they maintain Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability, also known as the CIA Triad:
Confidentiality: Only those authorized should have access, and only to the data they need.
Integrity: Data should be securely stored and transmitted, and no one should be able to tamper with it.
Availability: Authorized personnel should have access to the data, whenever needed.
According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, attacks against retailers have increased significantly over the last five years. Social engineering accounts for nearly one-third of all attacks and results in compromised credentials, which may be used at a later date to access business-critical data or deliver malware or ransomware into the network.
Security magazine supports that observation, stating that compromised usernames and passwords have risen by 300% since 2018. This data suggests that many organizations fail to meet the basic expectations of the CIA Triad, impacting their security posture and leaving them vulnerable to future threats.
Adapting to a changing landscape
Every organization bears a responsibility to protect its customers’ data. Cybercriminals will always look for new ways to get inside a network. A breach could ultimately result in damage to the brand, lost revenue, and loss in consumer trust. By adopting a zero-trust approach and implementing some basic cyber hygiene techniques, retailers can securely support future innovation, while being agile and responsive to changing business needs.
Protecting the consumer and retailer
The key tenets of any security operation are these: Reduce the probability of a successful cyberattack and mitigate the impact/loss should a breach occur.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) technologies, as part of a zero trust or least-privilege approach, leverage an ID, password token, key, or code in some combination to ensure that the user is who they claim to be -- and to reject compromised credentials. The user’s access to data is then limited, ensuring that they only access what they are supposed to access.
Appropriate segmentation can then prevent lateral access to other systems or data sources that the user is not authorized to access, and can prevent the propagation of malware and ransomware.
Retailers are increasingly moving workloads to cloud services, and more users are working, at least part-time, from home or on the road. New retail service offerings take the associate beyond the four walls of the store and appropriate access controls make sure that a trusted user can access the right data from a trusted location. All this requires providing secure connections to corporate resources from remote and edge locations.
Availability is an area of the CIA Triad that is frequently overlooked. Any number of issues may prevent or degrade service availability, including cyberattacks. It is important that monitoring goes beyond discrete components of the network to assess end-to-end performance and reliability -- and detect and respond to potential issues in availability before they impact a user. This provides secure, consistent, reliable experiences for both consumers and associates, wherever they may be.
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