2023-12-09 –, Rookie track
The following 15-minute presentation will discuss retail’s threat landscape, taking into consideration the top cyber crime trends for 2023 (AI, ecommerce fraud, and synthetic identity manipulation for example), threat actor campaigns, and a roundup of 2024 predictions for security professionals.
From a business perspective, some of the biggest challenges facing the industry require collaboration between retailers and security professionals. It is important to consider how different regions have their own customs, for example convenience and urgence for products is currently driving behaviours in the US, while Europe focuses on experience and storytelling abilities in-store and online.
Retailers are investing funds into new technologies, helping offer high-quality products in different time zones, and throughout different seasons of the year, however general customer spending has declined, due to cost-of-living shifting focus away from high-value items, and more towards promotional content.
Retail is not as binary as it once was pre-pandemic, where touchpoints only included a website, app, and physical store. Retailers provide multiple sales channels through ecommerce, marketplaces, and social media.
This means retail’s threat landscape has widened over the last years, heightened through connectivity, integration of technology, and recent developments in AI- data analysis. As a result, threat actors are exploiting this change to compromise retailers, to gather sensitive data, and conduct financially motivated attacks.
Alexandra Forsyth is currently a Security Delivery Senior Analyst, based within the cyber threat intelligence (CTI) team at Accenture.
In her role, Alexandra is the subject matter expert for retail and consumer goods and services industries. Alexandra is responsible for conducting strategic research, analysing data and collating evidence, to facilitate threat landscape reports for relative Accenture clients, and helping deliver presentations to stakeholders highlighting recommendations based on the industry research.
Prior to Accenture, Alexandra acquired the ability and enthusiasm to deliver bespoke intelligence services to clients in the cyber security space, as part of employment with a managed service provider (MSP) specialising in cyber threat intelligence. Alexandra has experience collaborating within a team, and independently on tasks pertinent to clients, supporting business as usual (BAU) operations, on-demand investigations, and open-source data gathering.