Resilience by Design: A Retailer’s Playbook for Cyber Survival
By Daryl Flack, Partner, Avella Security
In the wake of a series of high-profile breaches at major retailers – from luxury brands to high street names – one thing is crystal clear: retailers are no longer peripheral targets for cybercriminals; they’re front and centre. Cybercriminals aim to cause maximum disruption, erode customer trust, and extract financial gain, often by exploiting gaps in cyber resilience.
Retailers must therefore consider adopting a similar strategic approach to Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) operators if they want to become a harder target to compromise. That means embedding cyber resilience into systems, services, supply chains, and culture. This is resilience by design, and it’s becoming the only sustainable path forward in a constantly evolving threat landscape.
Why Resilience by Design Is Critical for Retail
Historically, retailers haven’t been held to the same cyber security standards as CNI or highly regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, or utilities. However, the threat landscape has changed, and attackers are not discriminating who they target. The same tools, tactics and techniques used to target CNI are also being used to target retailers, and many are finding themselves or their supply chain underprepared.
“Resilience by Design” demands a shift in mindset. It involves architecting systems and services with built-in resilience from day one, prioritising risk based, proactive security, cultural alignment, and strategic investment. It’s not just about avoiding breaches; it’s about ensuring operational continuity when breaches happen.
It means proactively building systems and processes that anticipate failure, withstand disruption, and recover quickly.
The Seven-Step Resilience Framework for Retailers
To truly embed resilience, retailers must integrate it at every level, from customer-facing services to back-end operations and supplier dependencies. Here’s a practical roadmap retail organisations should consider:
- Identify Critical Assets and Services
Start by knowing your assets and mapping your most vital processes. Identify what would cause the most significant impact to your business if it failed. Prioritise resilience around these core services.
- Understand How Things Can Fail
Retail systems are deeply interconnected. Identify interactions within and between systems and undertake scenario and threat modelling to anticipate how failures and attacks may occur.
- Embed Security and Resilience Early
Security shouldn’t an afterthought and bolted on at the end. It needs to start and persist throughout the entire lifecycle of a system. Apply secure-by-design principles to review controls regularly and monitor and alert for anomalous events.
- Foster a Cyber-Aware Culture
Cyber resilience isn’t just the IT or security team’s job. Everyone from store managers to marketing teams should understand how their actions affect cyber risk. Ensure all staff members are aware of the cyber threat and impacts they’re exposed to and the impact their actions can have on the organisation. Provide tailored and targeted awareness training to support this.
- Prepare to Respond and Recover
Create and rehearse incident response plans. Can your stores still function if a central system goes down? Can you recover your e-commerce platform from a ransomware attack? Test your backups and run recovery simulations.
- Continuously Improve
Treat every near miss or incident, your own or others’, as a learning opportunity. Use threat intelligence and incident reviews to refine your defences and update your risk models.
- Ongoing Governance and Assurance
Regularly assess your security posture of both your systems and that of your supply chain. Frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST, or NCSC CAF can provide structure, but they should not be used as a box ticking exercise. Use them to guide meaningful resilience improvements.
Segmentation: A Retail Priority
Among the resilience measures, segmentation deserves special attention in retail. It’s one of the most effective and underused strategies to contain cyber incidents and limit impact.
Effective segmentation limits the attack surface to ensure that a compromise in one element of a system (like a local till or device) doesn’t enable malicious access to wider systems e.g. payment or inventory platforms. This approach minimises the blast radius should a compromise occur.
What Retailers Can Learn from CNI
Retailers don’t need to match the scale or complexity of national infrastructure, but they can adopt its mindset. Here’s how:
- Zero Trust by Default: Authenticate every device, user, and action. Working on the basis of never trust, always verify, even inside your network.
- Supplier Risk Management: Retailers rely on hundreds of partners. Evaluate and monitor third-party security postures, build security requirements into contracts, and vet suppliers rigorously.
- Strong Governance: Create accountability for cyber resilience at the highest level. Track performance, review controls regularly, and prioritise continuous improvement.
A Strategic Mandate
For retailers, cyber attacks are now a matter of when, not if. The real differentiator is how quickly you can detect, contain, and recover from disruption. Adopting a “resilience by design” mindset is a core tenet of ensuring your business is resilient should a compromise occur.
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To find out how Avella Security can help your retail operation, reach out to them here.
