News
Three tips from Fujitsu on staying security-savvy this Black Friday
November 2017 by Paul McEvatt, Senior Manager, Cyber Security Strategy at Fujitsu UK
Whilst Black Friday may be a major milestone in any retailer’s annual calendar, it’s important to not forget that it can bring about a set of challenges for retailers when it comes to potential cyber-attacks.
Ahead of Black Friday this week, Paul McEvatt, Senior Manager, Cyber Security Strategy at Fujitsu UK & Ireland has shared his top three tips for keeping retailers security-savvy this Black Friday:
1. A ‘people’ issue: train your employees to be on high alert
“As phishing attacks increase by as much as 336% around Black Friday, both customers and employees are more at risk to email, text and social media scams than ever before. After all, because finding vulnerabilities is an attacker’s bread and butter, for retailers, hackers will be looking to exploit employee naivety to execute attacks. With it easy for employees to get distracted by Black Friday activities, it is crucial that employees from the board all the way down to graduate level are educated in simple best practices such as flagging ‘unusual’ emails from colleagues and not clicking on links from unknown senders.”
2. Implement real-time security to detect hackers
“Cyber criminals are bold and do not care how much damage they cause to get what they want. But because organisational awareness of potential attacks is on the rise, online criminals are finding new and creative ways to dupe people into compromising sensitive financial and personal data. What this means is “unusual behaviour” is getting harder to detect and might not seem unusual at all. Whilst it’s still vital that employees are more ‘cyber-aware’ through training schemes and relevant tools, retailers must not de-prioritise investment into technical and security controls and should be working with cyber partners to put in place preventative measures. With Black Friday an easy target for hackers, retailers need to start proactively searching for the threats themselves instead of waiting for breaches to happen- something that can be achieved with real-time threat detection tools.”
3. Equip your website to deal with large amounts of traffic
“Retailers know that consumers will be rushing to websites to get the best deals possible. Whether there is an accidental DDoS attack caused by this influx of traffic or malicious DDoS attacks taking websites offline, retailers are at huge risk of losing a huge amount of revenue if an attack is successful. Ensuring DDoS mitigation tools or services are in place, active and optimised should be a priority for any e-commerce provider.”
