We’re pleased to announce the availability of the 2023 AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report: Focus on Retail. The report examines the edge ecosystem, surveying retail IT leaders from around the world, and provides benchmarks for assessing your edge computing plans. This is the 12th edition of our vendor-neutral and forward-looking report. Last year’s focus on retail report documented how we secure the data, applications, and endpoints that rely on edge computing (get the 2022 report).

Using an external platform trusted by potential victims is proving to be a vital tool in the cybercriminal’s arsenal. New data shows the state of the threat and who’s at risk. The average business experienced around 81 social media attacks each month in Q1 of this year, according to new data from PhishLabs, increasing 12% over Q4, 2022 and 5% over Q1 of 2022.

The past three years have been challenging in many ways for the retail industry, and this uncertain reality isn’t going anywhere. The industry continues to face challenges; the cost-of-living and energy crisis, and expected period of economic downturn, are understandably unsettling for all sectors, with retail particularly hard hit in a recessionary period.

Over Christmas we relax and let our guard down as these are festive times to share with friends and family. Cybercriminals capitalize on this to launch attacks, with a spike in incidents on the days between Christmas and New Year. Threats involving social engineering to gain users’ trust are particularly common, hackers then spread fraud, ransomware and malware, enabling them to infect computers, steal private data and defraud users.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently published important cybersecurity guidance to help protect retailers, which comes right as the holiday shopping season is in full swing. Retail organizations are no strangers to cyber attacks. In fact, some recent large-scale retail industry cyber attacks have included popular brands such as Guess, Under Armour, CVS Health, Home Depot, and Target.

The 2022 holiday shopping season is here. Retailers’ discounts are kicking off early, and shoppers are eager to spend, especially with big price markdowns to come as the season progresses. And with the COVID-19 pandemic still a concern to shoppers, more people are expected to shop online this season. What this also means is that as consumers whip themselves into a shopping frenzy, cybercriminals have activated their seasonal scams to try and steal money or personal information.

Cyberattacks often target the retail sector, although many of these threats are aimed at the e-commerce channel, businesses have also reported incidents where in-store Wi-Fi access points and even IoT devices are exploited as attack vectors. This is reflected in several studies, which reveal that, together with the education sector, the fashion industry was one of the hardest hit last year and 60% of retail companies are at risk of suffering an attack.