Top 3 Cyber Risks Targeting Retail

Why Edge is all the rage in Retail

The retail industry benefits from the use of edge across several areas, especially given the increasing need to innovate and enhance the consumer experience to meet new and modern demands. As a result, more and more processes are being automated, so the edge possibilities are wide and plentiful.

Modern demands stem from making the back-end smoother and more efficient, to offering personalized experiences for in-store consumers. Besides, the rapid growth in e-commerce and online orders, coupled with consumer expectations of same-day or next-day delivery, which have only heightened since the pandemic was declared. In shops like Amazon, where the experience is cashierless and partially automated, Edge helps process the large volumes of data that need to be processed.

Edge puts retailers on the right track to achieve true digital transformation and leverage the latest technologies to optimize operations, automate processes, launch new consumer experiences, and be more efficient, resource and time-wise.

Now, transformative technologies such as video analytics, biometrics, augmented/virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and more, are making an impact in the retail industry, and they are all aimed at improving the customer experience as well as profitability. Now, customers expect an integrated and consistent experience across different retail channels, leaving data footprints either at the retailer’s data center or the cloud.

Retailers favor the use of edge environments to access easy and simplified integrations of networking and security aspects in their infrastructure. In fact, according to Gartner research, 20% of tier 1 multichannel retailers will use edge computing to enable edge artificial intelligence use cases by 2025.

As a result, it’s critical that retailers take a comprehensive approach to security infrastructure design at the Edge level, consolidating their applications under a common umbrella solution that is modular, reliable, scalable, and easy to manage.

Retail risks with Edge

According to IBM’s X-Force’s 2022 ranking, retail and wholesale were the fifth-most targeted industries, accounting for 7.3% of all attacks in 2021. Cybersecurity attacks like BEC, server access, data theft, and credential harvesting were the most prominent ones for retail and wholesale last year. Phishing attacks took the first spot with 38% of all attacks, followed by stolen credentials at 32%, and vulnerability exploitation coming in third with 23%.

Internet of Things devices

Brick-and-mortar retail stores rely more than ever on IoT devices such as cameras, sensors, and more to enhance the customer experience. As they gain popularity, these IoT devices need to be protected as bad actors love to tamper with them through sophisticated attacks that can result in multimillion dollar losses.

For robust protection and rich monitoring of these IoT devices, AI EdgeLabs provides advanced network and threat visibility, as well as early anomaly detection for threats that may come from IoT devices.

PCI DSS compliance

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS for short, is critical for any retailer organization that handles consumer credit card information. This sensitive data is usually targeted in high-profile attacks looking to steal money out of unsuspecting consumers.

Retailers need to implement firewalls, put strong security measures and systems in place, and provide maintenance to said systems to keep cyber criminals at bay. AI EdgeLabs is an all-in-one cybersecurity platform that acts as a smart firewall solution when it comes to cyber AI and attack prevention.

Avoid data leaks and data hacks

Data leaks are probably some of the most prominent cases of cyber attacks as typically, criminals get away with accessing volumes of personal data, endangering their right to privacy protection.

Retailers heavily rely on artificial intelligence for personal image/video data of customers. As such, it becomes increasingly important for retailers to implement protection layers to prevent hacking or data leaks beyond the well-known and accepted security measures that many employ and which criminals now find easy to bypass.

The AI EdgeLabs platform offers ongoing threat analytics to monitor threats based on the latest behavior-based analytics, as well as rich traffic inspection for anomalous patterns using Reinforcement Learning. The platform also provides automated incident response and remediation for immediate protection and maximum cybersecurity.