“Cyber Monday is a phenomenon that has taken the world by storm and it’s a trend that shows no sign of slowing,” said Ross Brewer, vice president and managing director for international markets at LogRhythm, in an email. “While it may have originated as little more than a marketing ploy at the hands of savvy retailers, it’s become embedded into the consumer conscious and, as a result, can prove to be a lucrative time for those with a preference for taking rather than giving during this season of good will.”
With online sales set to increase by 15% compared to last December, this can mean a massive threat to corporate security as workers point and click their way to deals and malware alike. And if proper preparations have not been made, many are likely to find themselves, as Brewer puts it, having a nightmare before Christmas.
“The spike in network activity that occurs at this time of year shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. From retailers processing millions of transactions, to businesses seeing more employees using corporate networks for online shopping – almost every organization will be affected and there is simply no excuse for not having the correct security measures in place,” he noted.
Consumers—who will likely be carrying out much of this activity at work—are receiving offer after offer in their email inboxes, with links to be clicked and flyers to be opened, and are being urged by online advertisements to click and surf to new deals. And amid all of the festivities, it’s easy to forget that many of those offers will be bogus, and many of the webpages and emailed links and attachments will be malicious, ready to drop backdoor-fomenting malware onto machines.
To put the magnitude of the exposure into perspective, consider the fact that online sales are expected to peak at a record high for the year, with retailer Amazon predicting it will beat last year’s run-rate, when it sold 41 products per second. Those high figures are set to continue through the month of December, with sales figures set to reach a record $17 billion. That’s a lot of online surfing.
Recent LogRhythm research found that consumers are increasingly wary about organizations’ ability to keep their data safe, with nearly half of survey respondents stating they believe it to be inevitable that their data will be compromised at some point. In a stark warning, 53% also said they would think twice about giving their business to an organization that had been breached.
“There is no doubt that for some, lessons will be learnt the hard way this December and without the correct systems in place, the same will happen year after year,” Brewer added. “In order to avoid a ‘Groundhog Day’ scenario, organizations must have constant, 360-degree visibility into any activity taking place on their IT network.”
He advocates granular insight allows any anomalous activity to be identified and remediated in real time – before it’s too late. “With such a holistic approach to network security, businesses are better able to protect the data of their customers and keep their reputations intact,” Brewer noted. “Any that fail to do so, will have more than coal under the Christmas tree to worry about.”