Infographic: After A Year of Breaches, Are Retailers More Secure?

After a year in which some of the U.S.’s top retailers found themselves on the wrong side of sophisticated, cyber criminal hacking groups, you may be tempted to search for a silver lining. Maybe the up side of all the attacks on retail networks and point of sale systems is an improved security posture overall? After all: if your neighbors to the left and right have their house broken into, you may well beef up your locks and alarms, even if your house hasn’t been targeted.

Most retailers saw their overall security score decline (on BitSight's scale) rather than increase during 2014.
Most retailers saw their overall security score decline (on BitSight’s scale) rather than increase during 2014.

Or, at least, that’s how the thinking goes. But Boston-based BitSight took a look at how the retail sector is faring security-wise as 2014 draws to a close. BitSight is an interesting company. They market a kind of reputation monitoring service: assessing security posture for companies by observing how they look from the outside. Think of it as a kind of Experian or TransUnion for security.

Their data suggests that there is still plenty of room for improvement in the retail sector. In fact, 58 percent of retailers saw their security performance scores decline in 2014, even with news of breaches at competitors like Target, Home Depot and others.

link_scaled Read more Security Ledger coverage of retail breaches here.

Sure: most companies that actually experienced a breach improved their security – but that wasn’t true all the time. And, over all, the industry continued to suffer from a variety of threats and attacks while security readiness declined, BitSight found.

Check out their cool infographic below, which highlights some of the main data points from their survey. Check it out for yourself!

BitSight - Tis the Season for Safer Shopping Infographic
This infographic from the firm BitSight suggests that retailers are still struggling to secure their networks, even after high profile breaches.

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