How Security Intelligence Protects Sensitive Retail Data

Neiman Marcus… Target… Home Depot… Panera Bread… Macy’s: These retailers are among the most famous brands that have suffered major cyberattacks. It doesn’t end there. Just recently, fashion brand H&M apologized and could face a fine of close to $1 billion for data protection breaches that involved illegally stored employee data.

Defending Data and Digital Assets: A Major Challenge for Retailers

One reason why retailers are frequently victimized by cyberattacks is because they must cater to a large customer base of connected consumers. Those customers are not always savvy when it comes to protecting log-in credentials. Any customer that provides a cybercriminal with an easy entryway to a retailer’s website or mobile app just might make that retailer’s digital assets vulnerable to a full-blown cyberattack.

Retail organizations process high volumes of financial transactions and store customer data in multiple databases, as well. In addition, retailers deploy many endpoints throughout their stores to service customers. Every retail company’s third-party supply chain represents a whole host of potential security risks to systems and data, as well. High staff turnover is another factor that makes it difficult to maintain a culture of security consistent from shift-to-shift — never mind season-to-season and year-to-year.

On top of all this, retailers are under tremendous pressure to continuously innovate with e-commerce sites and in-store technologies such as self-checkout, near-field communications, RFID inventory, beacons, point-of-sale devices, and digital menus. And guest WiFi is now something customers expect from just about every store they enter.

All of these factors make it difficult for retailers to maintain a strong security posture, and failing to do so exposes them to a wide range of cybercriminal risks. If someone compromises a single device, they may gain access to an entire network — and potentially to sensitive customer data. If that happens, there’s certain to be a major impact on revenue, and also brand reputation.

Security Intelligence Is the Answer for Retail Businesses

To take on these security challenges and disrupt adversaries at scale, Recorded Future created the world’s most advanced security intelligence platform. It combines analytics with human expertise to unite an unrivaled variety of open source, dark web, technical sources, and original research.

By dynamically categorizing, linking, and analyzing intelligence in real time, the Recorded Future Security Intelligence Platform delivers easy-to-consume insights for proactively reducing risk via six distinct modules that are tailored to your needs.

These six solutions move at the speed of business by empowering security teams to expose unknown threats and use intelligence to empower better, faster decision-making and amplify risk reduction across the entire organization.

Security Intelligence in Action for Retailers

Here are three use cases that illustrate how security intelligence empowers retail security teams to identify, prioritize, and mitigate risk:

- Prioritizing Vulnerabilities: Retail organizations deploy multiple systems to process customer payments. These devices generally connect to the internet, as well as cloud environments, making them enticing and accessible targets for attackers. Security intelligence solves this challenge by surfacing which vulnerabilities hackers are actively exploiting. This makes it possible for security teams to patch the most relevant vulnerabilities right away — before negative consequences occur.

• Defending the Brand: For retail organizations, their brand is their most valuable asset — but their reputations are instantly damaged beyond repair when customer data becomes compromised. Security intelligence makes it easy to monitor for domain abuse (like typosquat websites that may be used in phishing campaigns targeting customers) and get assistance to take them down.

• Detecting Weak Links in the Supply Chain: In order to maintain business continuity, retailers need to outsource certain functions to third-party vendors. However, any security risk to a company in their supply chain potentially introduces security risk to the retailer. Security intelligence provides immediate, ongoing visibility into new third-party risks as they arise with deep analysis about the ever-evolving risk landscapes for more than 150,000 companies — updated in real time.

Protecting the Bottom Line for Retailers

For retail businesses, security intelligence is the key to maintaining a strong brand, customer trust, and even a positive balance sheet. We commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study that examines the ROI benefits a major global retailer realized when using Recorded Future. The report illustrates how this client’s security workflow efficiency improved by 50%. That alone resulted in $263,538 saved — but the savings did not end there.

Download Forrester’s study today to read the full breakdown of monetary savings when using Recorded Future.