The retail industry has long been a target for fraud, but with the fast-moving, rapidly growing environment of e-commerce, the attack surface has grown and it’s become an even more prominent target for cyber criminals. Retailers have millions of customers, whose information and card data are tempting targets. Attackers leverage retailers’ increasing use of cloud services, human vulnerability to phishing attacks, and complex supply chains to gain access to whatever “crown jewels” they want.

CounterCraft provides retail security defenders with detailed visibility across a vast infrastructure to improve their cyber response, decisions, and investments. CounterCraft’s expertise in the area of supply chain manufacturing allows you to cut down supply chain risk with both OT and IT deception-driven threat intel.

We’ve created a full data sheet on how deception technology can improve the security posture of the retail industry that you can download here. Read more about the specific challenges and our solution below.

The Specific Challenges of Retail

The retail industry eagerly pursued digital transformation as e-commerce revolutionized shopping, allowing them to use customer data and segmentation to deliver unique experiences. Unfortunately, that customer data also creates new vulnerabilities that weren’t part of traditional brick-and-mortar retail:

  • E-commerce platforms are often outsourced and difficult to secure.
  • POS systems have many components and are often run by outdated operating systems, equipment, or insufficient remote access tools.
  • Hackers can scrape credit card data from websites, contributing to already ever-present credit card fraud.
  • A retail organization is only as secure as the weakest link on its supply chain.
  • Intellectual property theft, from new designs to “new-season” campaigns, is a real risk as industrial espionage and counterfeits run rampant.

Making things worse, the sector is an attractive target due to its growing size, yet security teams remain understaffed and under-resourced. As these high-value networks are ever more vulnerable to attack, it is vital to find new security solutions. Deception technologies can be used to provide an extra dimension of security to retail networks. With deception, it is possible to detect malicious activity, collect valuable threat intel and also create and respond to adversary activity in real time.

Example Campaign for the Retail Industry

This is an example of a campaign designed to protect the platform from unauthorized insider activity. This campaign allows organizations to observe attack vectors and identify the data important to their adversaries.

1. In Phase 1, an aspect of microservice architecture is left vulnerable, such as OpenShift or Kubernetes.
2. Any actor that finds it and enters then finds themself in a deception environment, allowing intel on their movements to be reported to the deception director, revealing their every action and intention.

The Result

Benefits

Deception can help in the proactive protection of high-value targets without imposing any burden on the normal operation of services.

  • Actionable threat intelligence with zero false positives tailored to your organization Intuitive platform requiring minimal technical resources to manage
  • Flexible deployment model that includes on premise within the network, on premise outside the network, and in any Cloud Service Provider environment
  • No emulations and no complicated physical and/or virtual appliances. We install on real unallocated/nonproduction physical or virtual systems
  • ruly mimic your production environment by deploying the necessary servers, endpoints, applications, and services required
  • Real-time telemetry, Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), and Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures (TTPs)
  • Automatically map threat intelligence to the native MITRE ATT&CK Framework integration within the platform
  • Protects your current investments by integrating with existing solutions

To learn more about how deception is uniquely positioned to protect the retail industry, download the full data sheet here.

For more examples of how deception has prevented cyber attacks and to learn more about CounterCraft, contact us.