With the holiday season now in sight, businesses and consumers alike have begun to prepare for the annual shopping and gift giving frenzy. Prices are seeing a much-needed plunge, but this is also the time of year where cybersecurity hygiene tends to drop, too.
As inboxes flood with messages about markdowns galore, opportunistic cyber criminals use this time to step up their holiday scams. This post covers why seasonal retail is under attack by cyber criminals, five common holiday season scams, and what businesses and shoppers can do to keep up their cyber defenses.
Why Seasonal Retail Is Under Attack
From late November through to the end of the year, consumers across the globe rack up billions of dollars shopping holiday deals and giving generously to charities. When the COVID-19 pandemic first made its impact across the world in early 2020, online shopping surged, and now more people than ever make purchases virtually.
Deloitte’s 2022 Holiday Retail Survey found that the online shopping trends seen during the height of the pandemic have endured. This year, the survey reported that online shopping took a 63% share; numbers that are on par with the previous two years.
Shoppers this year also note they are not “giving up the convenience of online shopping” even as they warm up to in-store visits, and 66% of retail executives expect online holiday shopping traffic to have at least single-digit growth over last year.
Those kinds of figures are naturally attractive to…
