Holiday Shopping Season Means Cyber Threats for Retailers

Black Friday is nearly here, but the holiday shopping season has already started ramping up. The worst thing that could happen to a retail store right now is a ransomware attack that shuts down your entire system — e-commerce as well as in-store. Not only would you lose the ability to sell during the most important shopping season of the year, your store’s reputation would take a very public hit. 

That black mark can have heavy financial impacts for several quarters. Just ask Target about that.

Shoplifting isn’t the only spike in crime that retailers face during the holidays. If your company isn’t already preparing for increased cyber attacks, you’re putting your business at risk of significant financial and reputational loss.

Adversaries aren’t waiting for Black Friday, either. Research is reporting that bad actors are already active for the 2025 holiday period, with new levels of automation and more adaptive attack patterns. 

More Cyber Threats Than Ever

The National Retail Federation is predicting retail sales in November and December will increase by 3.7% and 4.2% over 2024’s holiday shopping season. That’s a total of more than $1 trillion in spending. To keep up with increased shopping demand, retailers will need to hire more temporary staff than last year. 

More shoppers, more transactions, and more seasonal staff mean more cyber threats.

Compounding this is the fact that your most experienced employees will be stretched thin, or possibly taking the opportunity of the additional staffing to take time off. That means the skeleton crew primarily manning the store will be far less likely to spot the signs of an attack.

AI-Enabled Attacks Are Increasing

Bad actors are using AI capabilities to infiltrate retailers’ systems. AI bots have become increasingly sophisticated. These bots can mimic human behavior and even bypass security measures to access sensitive data on your internal network. From there, they can scrape price data, launch credential stuffing attacks, create fake accounts, and more.

“Grinch bots” are very active during the holiday shopping season. A grinch bot essentially accesses your inventory, finds high priced in-demand items, and purchases them with a fake account to resell them. 

AI-driven bot attacks can adapt quickly, which makes it challenging to detect and mitigate their attacks. Retailers need to prioritize detection capabilities and be extremely vigilant for any suspicious behavior within their various systems.

Get More Proactive in Cyber Defense

75 percent of retail organizations say they’re boosting their endpoint detection and response (EDR) this year, compared to 2024. This is vital for effective defense, but it isn’t sufficient. EDR is inherently reactive — it performs detection and issues alerts after an attack has already occurred. 

For a robust and holistic defense against holiday cyber attacks, it’s critical to invest in preemptive data security as well — spotting attackers before they can make their move.

Equip Your Systems for Greater Protection

Develop a robust bot management strategy that can watch for and identify malicious bot traffic across your various sites and systems. Effective bot management includes:

• Evaluating traffic risks
• Identifying potential entry points
• Blocking outdated user agents
• Limiting proxies
• Monitoring for signs of automated activity

It’s also important to defend against business logic abuse. AI bots can be incredibly challenging to detect, so it’s critical to enforce strict user validation policies and monitor for anomalies or other unusual activities.

Also be sure to audit your business processes on a regular basis to discover potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

Don’t Cut Corners with Holiday Hiring

Record-setting holiday spending means you’ll probably need to hire more temporary workers than ever before, and get them through onboarding expediently. In the mad rush to get new workers trained and on the floor, it can be easy to gloss over due diligence and unknowingly hire bad actors. In fact, they’re counting on it.

Holiday season is a prime opportunity for threat actors to gain physical access to sensitive data — whether it’s your POS system, the manager’s office, or employee lockers.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to do your due diligence and perform a thorough background check on every single applicant you intend to hire. It may be perceived to slow down your hiring process, but in many cases these have the capability to be run online and within hours. So don’t allow a misconception to guide your organization down the wrong path. 

Appropriately performing these background checks could very well be the defining action that saves your company millions of dollars in clean-up costs after a very public incident — not to mention lost revenue from the unflattering headlines. 

Make sure through your annual vendor management procedures that vendors with either physical or logical access to your physical premises or systems are attesting to running background checks on their personnel also.

Update Your Employee Training

If your holiday security training is simply a rehashed version of previous years’ training sessions, your retail stores will be woefully unprepared to protect your company’s sensitive data and financial transactions. While the same old holiday scams are in play in 2025, you’ll need to prepare your staff for the latest cyber threats on retail stores.

Don’t limit holiday training to store employees. Corporate staff should be trained and retrained as well, including IT personnel, online customer service, and compliance teams. 

How to Train Your Organization to Follow PCI DSS

Increase In-store Vigilance

While there are plenty of new threats to monitor, the familiar holiday shopping scams are still in play in 2025. TCT recommends that youinspect your POS/POI devices at least once every day — not just once or twice during the holiday season. It’s a good practice to get your personnel inspecting at least every time a new team member gets on the floor in that particular department. 

You’re busy, you’ve got all that new staff, and people are distracted — it’s tough to remain vigilant, and every day presents plenty of prime opportunities for thieves to plant a skimmer without being spotted. Whenever suspicious behavior is observed around the POS/POI devices, perform additional inspections right then, in advance of pushing through additional transactions (aka potential victims).

Retail managers need to pay attention to all of the vulnerable points of attack. They have a responsibility to protect the store and the store’s customers. 

Invest in Modern Cybersecurity Tools

Recent reports show that more than half of retail security teams are implementing AI integrated cyber defenses, which shows that retailers have their eyes on developing cybersecurity trends. However, approximately one in four (24%) say that they still haven’t replaced outdated security tools.

Without the right tools, you won’t be able to effectively defend your organization from quickly evolving cyber attacks. Make it a policy to be continually analyzing, and as appropriate, updating your tech stack to ensure you can meet increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. 

The Best PCI-DSS Compliance Management Tool for Franchises

Be Fanatical About PCI DSS Compliance

As a retailer, your organization is required to comply with the PCI DSS. But there’s attaining the absolute bare minimum, and there’s compliance with seriously effective security. The more seriously you take your PCI compliance, the better equipped you’ll be to protect your retail business from cyber attacks and other security threats. I’ve seen plenty of organizations over the years take a minimalistic approach toward their compliance with PCI, and those are usually the ones that end up with their name in lights on all the wrong headlines.

Don’t cut corners with the PCI DSS. Make sure your Assessor is running you through the gauntlet during your annual assessments, and setting a high bar for your compliance personnel to take advantage of the opportunity to thoroughly and securely implement every requirement. 

It’s not enough to take a check-the-box approach and simply assume you’re covered on each requirement. Merely having antivirus software doesn’t mean you’re fulfilling PCI antivirus requirements.

In the retail environment, PCI compliance can be incredibly complex, especially when it comes to coordinating evidence submissions between corporate headquarters and a myriad of local stores. But if you’re using an automated compliance management system like TCT Portal, your compliance engagements become surprisingly streamlined and simplified. 

Not only are you better protected during the holiday shopping season, your compliance team is far more effectively utilizing their limited bandwidth to do a more effective job and have a fighting chance to enjoy the holidays with less overtime. 

Let’s Make the Shopping Season Bright

As holiday foot traffic and online sales reach record highs, the stakes for your retail operation have never been greater. This season, don’t let a preventable cyber incident become the headline your customers remember. Equip your business with modern, layered security that utilizes the right technology. Stay one step ahead of threat actors and make security a non-negotiable part of your holiday campaign. 

And count on TCT to equip you with the knowledge, support, and tools you need to protect your retail organization more effectively and more efficiently. Here’s to a safe, successful, and secure holiday sales season.