Why retailers need to be cautious this Black Friday and Cyber Monday
As the year draws to a close, people everywhere are gearing up for the holiday season. With Thanksgiving this week and Christmas fast approaching, the season of shopping is upon us.Every year Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate a large number of sales in the retail industry and this year’s expectations are no less. Black Friday retail sales are expected to hit almost $7.5 billion, which is 20% more than last year, as per Adobe Analytics (Business Insider, 2019).However, besides the high sales figures, Black Friday and Cyber Monday also bring with them opportunities for cybercrimes. The importance of cyber security cannot be stressed enough and below are a few reasons why retailers need to be cautious during the shopping season.
- In 2018, the online retail giant Amazon faced a data breach exposing customer names and email addresses a few days before Black Friday (The Guardian, 2018).
- In October 2019, American retailer Macy’s were hit with a security breach where some of its online customers had their personal data and card details stolen (InfoSecurity Magazine, 2019).
- November 2019 saw another data breach as OnePlus became the target when its customers’ names, numbers and addresses were leaked by hackers (Forbes, 2019).
When a company faces such security breaches that compromises their customers’ data, it can result in major financial losses, a loss of trust in the company and harms the overall brand reputation!Cyber threats and attacks are expected to occur again this year. The solution to reduce your vulnerability to cybercrimes is by incorporating
Multi-Factor Authentication.Giving customers secure access to their accounts does more than just prevent account breaches. Secure authentication builds a circle of trust around and within a service, offers a competitive advantage for companies and makes secure services easy for customers to consume.
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Published: 28 November 2019
Category: Industry News
Customer Experience / Data Security Awareness / MFA
