Black Friday is one of the most lucrative days of the year for many retailers, with consumers expected to spend billions. This, of course, offers the retail industry a massive opportunity to boost sales and attract new customers.
It is also a prime target for cybercriminals, with increased traffic and high transaction volumes creating opportunities for cyberattacks. An incident or outage could not only jeopardise short windows for significant revenue but also damage your reputation and customer trust at a time when many retailers are shining a spotlight on themselves.
To ensure your website remains secure and operational during this existing period, it’s essential to take proactive steps that will help protect your business and safeguard your customers.
In preparation for Black Friday and the subsequent peak trading period, we have built a quick checklist to help you reduce risk and protect revenues.
Observe Your Website in Real-Time
- Traffic: Use tools (such as Google Analytics) or your hosting dashboard to track traffic surges. Unusual spikes could indicate bot activity or a DDoS attack.
Monitor for Suspicious Activity
- Unusual Orders: Look for high-value or unusual purchases from unfamiliar IPs or geographic locations.
- Failed Login Attempts: Monitor admin and user login attempts. A spike in failures may indicate a brute force attack.
- Bot Activity: Use CAPTCHA tools where necessary and monitor checkout processes for bots trying to exploit vulnerabilities.
Communicate with Customers
- Social Media and Email: Monitor for customer complaints about checkout issues, slow loading, or phishing attempts impersonating your brand.
- Phishing & Scam Alerts: Warn customers about fake emails and scams pretending to be your site.
Check Payment Gateways
- Transaction Logs: Regularly check your payment processor logs to ensure transactions are processing without errors or delays.
- Fraud Alerts: Review alerts from your fraud detection systems for flagged transactions.
Test Critical Functions
- Periodically test: Perform regular check to ensure critical functionality is working as expected: ensures everything works as expected even under heavy traffic volumes.
- Add-to-cart functionality.
- Checkout process.
- Payment processing.
Update Security Settings if Needed
- Rate Limiting: If traffic is overwhelming, temporarily reduce login attempts or impose rate limits to prevent misuse.
- Geoblocking: If you are suspect you are being targeted by bots from specific regions, block traffic from those IP ranges.
Respond to Issues Quickly
- Server Crashes: Restart or contact your hosting provider if your site goes down.
- Cyber Threats: If you detect an attack (e.g., DDoS, malware), activate your incident response plans.
Keep Your Team Alert
Ensure your IT, support teams and any critical partners are on standby throughout to address issues such as:
- Server downtimes.
- Bug fixes.
- Cybersecurity threats.
Backup Throughout the Day
- Schedule backups at key intervals to ensure minimal data loss if something goes wrong.
Be Ready to Scale
- If your website starts to lag due to heavy traffic:
- Use a CDN to offload static content.
- Upgrade your server resources if necessary.
These simple steps should help towards minimising disruptions, protect your revenue, and deliver a smooth experience for your customers.
If you require information security or data protection support, please get in touch with us. Our friendly and experienced team will be on hand to help.
We wish you the most successful trading period this festive season.
The Blackfoot Team
