Cyber crime is causing more chaos than ever, and looms large for small business owners as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach and pose an enormous challenge to their online operations.
Retailers must protect themselves ― and their customers ― by being proactive about spotting scams, limiting the damage, and recovering quickly from any possible attack.
Black Friday kicks off the busiest retail season of the year, a stretch that’s both a major financial boon for retailers ― and a big opportunity for malicious cyber threats to strike. And strike they will. Taken as a whole, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the World Cup for online commerce and cyber criminality.
The business ramifications of the big shopping weekend are massive: last year shoppers spent $10.8 billion on Cyber Monday, shattering the previous year’s record of $9.4 billion, making it the single largest day for online sales in U.S. history. Black Friday was a bonanza as well, with $9 billion being spent online, a nearly 22% jump from the previous year.
Online shopping as a whole continues its dramatic upward trajectory. According to Statista, global retail e-commerce sales will hit $4.89 trillion in 2021, and there’s no slowdown in sight: by 2024 global e-commerce sales are projected to reach $6.38 trillion.
Unfortunately, this remarkable growth in online retail comes with matching risk: cyber crime.
Online fraud, cyberattacks, and data breaches plague industries around the globe, powered by ever-evolving strategies designed to avoid detection and maximize disruption and payoff. Despite growing cybersecurity vigilance, attacks are on the rise and figure to reach another level during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Here are common ― and some less well known ― forms of cyberattacks that retailers must be aware of:
While major online retailers have certainly been hit hard in the past decade (think Target, Home Depot, and eBay to name a few), it’s smaller businesses that are most vulnerable to the devastating impact of an online attack.
43% of online attacks were aimed at small businesses in 2019, to an average cost of $200,000. That type of damage cannot be sustained by most businesses, and the result is crushing: according to Vox, 60% of small businesses that suffer a cyber attack go out of business within 6 months.
Governments take notice too. For example, the U.S. Congress in July of 2021 reviewed the cyber attack burden on small businesses, specifically ransomware.
Yet too many retailers are unprepared to handle an attack. According to a recent survey only 28% of small business owners had a plan in place in case of a cyber attack; almost half (42%) have no plan at all.
So what steps small businesses can take as the World Cup of Cybercrime approaches?
The current threat landscape poses extreme risk to every business, no matter the size or vertical. This should force small business retailers to embrace a dedication and awareness of relevant protections that can help them fend off a cyber attack.
The cost of not being prepared could be the loss of the business itself. And everyone wants to win and take home the World Cup trophy.
Find out more about protecting your business from cyber attacks.
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Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. Guardian over millions of consumer, enterprise, and government environments, Bitdefender is one of the industry’s most trusted experts for eliminating threats, protecting privacy, digital identity and data, and enabling cyber resilience. With deep investments in research and development, Bitdefender Labs discovers hundreds of new threats each minute and validates billions of threat queries daily. The company has pioneered breakthrough innovations in antimalware, IoT security, behavioral analytics, and artificial intelligence and its technology is licensed by more than 180 of the world’s most recognized technology brands. Founded in 2001, Bitdefender has customers in 170+ countries with offices around the world.
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