5 Ways Retailers Can Stay Safe Over the Holidays

The holidays are almost here and retailers are gearing up for another record season for their ecommerce operations.

Research group eMarketer estimates that ecommerce retail sales over the holidays will top $94 billion this year, up 17.2% from last year and dramatically up from slightly more than $54 billion five years ago. Ecommerce will account for 10.7% of total retail sales for the holidays, while it was only slightly under 7% in 2012.

Trevor Hawthorn, CTO at Wombat, adds that while ecommerce companies face security threats all year round, the sheer volume of traffic during the holidays increases anxiety about serious security breaches.

“We all remember that the Target breach happened during the holiday shopping season,” Hawthorn points out. “Companies have to work closely with their customer support staffs and especially look out for social engineering scams. Chat operations in call centers can sometimes lead to breach outcomes, and it is very different than scammers skimming credit card numbers at a gas station.”

Omri Dotan, chief business officer for Morphisec, adds that companies have to focus on protecting their endpoints and servers, and find new innovative ways to remediate threats that lurk in networks for several months before surfacing as a malicious attack.

“Most ecommerce companies have been working on these issues since the summer, but for those that haven’t, they need to think more about the emerging category of advanced endpoint threat prevention,” he explains.

Based on interviews with Hawthorn and Dotan we developed five points for tuning up your e-commerce operations for the holidays.