For criminals, retail is where the money is. The possibility of spiriting away and selling thousands or millions of credit card details and chunks of consumer information is powerful incentive.
Modern retailers have had decades to toughen their brick-andmortar stores against theft, but only a few years to harden their IT networks against data theft. Criminals have turned to the more subtle and lucrative option of sneaking onto the network, exploiting internal gaps in security and quietly copying huge amounts of sensitive data to storage outside of the network.
These breaches include attack vectors as diverse as viruses, spyware, phishing, rogue software, encrypted threats and spam. A multilayer strategy is the only realistic defense against them.