For the majority of company owners, the holidays are a hectic time as they get ready to serve customers eager to find bargains or even as they get ready to take time off from their enterprises to spend time with friends and family. Hackers will search for weaknesses in your systems since they know you are diverted from your primary responsibilities and daily activities. With these suggestions, you can stay safe during this busy period.

  1. During the holidays, be on the lookout. Avoid getting sidetracked during busy times. When hackers know that your attention is on seasonal income and customer interaction in the retail industry, they specifically target U.S. holidays. Maintain visibility during the holidays, schedule routine vulnerability checks, encourage everyone of your staff to follow best practices for cybersecurity, and keep critical servers and systems patched.
  2. Make certain that your retail company has a cellular failover strategy. In point-of-sale (POS) systems, the internet connection can drop for causes that are out of your control. To prevent losing revenue, you must literally avoid downtime at all costs. An autonomous cellular failover solution increases uptime to 99.99 percent.
  3. Control how well your internet works. Your internet service provider’s infrastructure can be heavily taxed during a busy shopping season. Making ensuring that traffic is appropriately divided and the POS payments traffic is prioritized is an excellent strategy to combat erratic network performance. Make that the threshold you’ve chosen for when the connection should go to the cellular failover network is appropriate.
  4. You’re good to go because your POS system complies with PCI DSS, right? Not always. The very minimum required for transaction security and customer data protection is PCI compliance. You might wish to update your incident response plan and step up network monitoring at your retail locations throughout the holiday season. Keep abreast with the sophisticated dangers that are prevalent at this time of year. Your holiday won’t be ruined by malware.
  5. To find worthwhile targets, consider yourself a hacker. Threat actors want to utilize your login information or resell your sensitive data because they are financially incentivized to do so. Credit card information, databases for loyalty programs, inventories of gift cards, and login information for other assets or supply-chain partners are examples of desirable targets. Management of Security Information and Event (SIEM) platform provides you with continuous monitoring and alerting to identify suspicious activity and quickly detect intrusions before more damage occurs.

With these suggestions, we hope you may enjoy a safe, secure, and unhacked holiday season. Need support? So that you can concentrate on managing your business, we’ve got you covered. For more information on safe SD-Branch, SIEM, or SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) for small- to medium-sized merchants, get in touch with us.