Black Friday: How to Protect Your Retail Clients from Ransomware
Black Friday is one of the most demanding seasons for the retail sector. Massive spikes in online traffic, aggressive promotions, and pressure to keep services available significantly increase the risk of an attack. Cybercriminals are aware of this and exploit the saturation to launch ransomware campaigns, phishing attempts, and supply chain attacks that aim to disrupt operations, steal sensitive data, and cause maximum impact.
Several recent cases confirm this trend. In May of this year, the British retailer Marks & Spencer suffered a ransomware attack that temporarily shut down its online store, with an estimated impact of up to £300 million in a single fiscal year. According to a WatchGuard-led survey conducted with the Canalys community, 39% of organizations consider ransomware the most concerning threat during high-activity periods. This context presents a clear challenge: ensuring digital resilience at the time of highest operational pressure.
The Challenge for MSPs: Anticipate, Prioritize, and Respond
The biggest challenge during this season isn’t just identifying threats, it’s anticipating them before they affect business continuity. Retail environments generate amounts of data and network traffic from point-of-sale systems, e-commerce platforms, connected inventory, logistics systems, and cloud services. Without unified visibility, this volume of information can hide critical signals that indicate an attack in progress. As an MSP, you need to quickly understand which incidents have real impact and which can be dismissed so your teams don’t get overwhelmed or delay essential actions. The lack of context between different security layers, from network and endpoints to identity and cloud, makes this task difficult and increases the chances of missing a critical incident at the worst possible moment.
According to WatchGuard’s Internet Security Report 2025, the number of advanced persistent threats (APTs) detected on endpoints in Q2 of this year increased by 524% compared to the same period in 2024. This reflects a clear jump in sophistication and volume of attacks that directly affects your ability to respond. This is where an XDR solution like ThreatSync makes a difference. By automatically consolidating and correlating security data from multiple layers—network, endpoints, cloud, and identity—the platform provides a complete and contextual view of every incident. This enables you to quickly identify attack patterns, prioritize events that represent real risk, and automate containment actions such as isolating compromised devices or stopping malicious processes, reducing the chances of an attack spreading. By centralizing all client monitoring into a single platform, ThreatSync enables more efficient management, speeds up response, and helps teams maintain control even during peak operational pressure.
However, protecting against Black Friday threats doesn’t rely on technology alone. It requires a clear strategy that combines visibility, context, and immediate action. This means preparing ahead of time, understanding each client’s specific risks, prioritizing correctly, and relying on solutions that reduce uncertainty when pressure is highest.
The difference between containing an incident in time or facing an interruption that affects thousands of transactions can come down to seconds—but above all, to the quality of the information behind your decisions. If Black Friday is a challenge for retail, it’s also your opportunity as an MSP to demonstrate leadership, effectiveness, and strategic value in protecting their digital business.