Did your cyber defences hold up during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

01/12/25 Wavenet
Did your cyber defences hold up during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday and Black Friday have come and gone, with the UK consistently ranking second in global participation to what is the biggest online shopping event. Each year continues to set new records, Barclay’s predicted that UK shoppers would spend a whopping £10.2bn Black Friday 20251.

For consumers, it's a perfect mix of discounts and seasonal spending. For retailers, it’s a high-stakes revenue driver. But for cyber criminals, it’s the perfect opportunity.

If last year felt tense, chaotic, or if you experienced suspicious emails, system slowdowns, or website performance issues, you're not alone. And now is the ideal time to strengthen your defences before your next seasonal peak.

 

What do Black Friday and Cyber Monday expose?

1. Phishing and malware spikes

Cyber Monday is one of the worst days of the year for phishing emails. Scammers flood inboxes with fake offers, bogus shipping updates, and convincing replicas of major retailers’ websites.

Even if your business doesn’t take part in Cyber Monday, you’re still at risk. Employees shopping on work devices or simply checking personal emails during breaks could have easily opened the door to malware.

It only takes one employee clicking a malicious link for malware to spread quietly across your systems, keylogging, stealing data, or lying dormant until the attacker chooses to deploy ransomware.

If anything, suspicious happened internally last week, consider it an early warning.

 

2. Website performance and downtime

For online retailers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic is a blessing, until it isn’t. High demand exposes weak points in infrastructure, and attackers know this is the single most profitable day to cause disruption.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remain common, but more sophisticated, targeted attacks are increasingly used to take down sites or extort payment. Even short outages can be financially and reputationally devastating.

If your site slowed down, suffered interruptions, or behaved unpredictably this year, now is the time to investigate why.

 

3. Credential-stuffing and account takeover attempts

The shopping season is prime time for attackers to leverage previously stolen passwords. With thousands of customers logging in, criminals run automated scripts to test leaked credentials and compromise accounts.

For businesses, this exposes:

  • Weak or reused passwords among customers and staff.
  • Insufficient multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • Gaps in monitoring for unusual login patterns.

If you noticed unexplained login attempts or customer-account resets, this was a warning sign.

 

4. Third-party and supply-chain weaknesses

Retailers rely heavily on payment processors, delivery partners, marketing platforms, and web-hosting providers.

 

Black Friday/Cyber Monday traffic often reveals:

  • Poorly secured third-party plugins.
  • API vulnerabilities.
  • Misconfigured integrations under load.

If a partner system slowed down or malfunctioned, it may have created data-exposure risks or attack pathways into your environment.

 

5. Gaps in monitoring and incident response readiness

Finally, the holiday surge exposes which organisations can actually detect and respond to threats in real time.

Many learned the hard way that:

  • Logs weren’t being collected centrally.
  • Alerts weren’t configured correctly.
  • Overnight/weekend coverage was weak.
  • No one was watching critical systems when volumes peaked.

These gaps are exactly why managed detection and response (MDR) makes such a difference.

Avoid the same problems next time...

Cyber attacks continue to rise, and this period is a prime target for criminals. Preparation can’t start a week before the holiday period, it needs to be built into your year-round cyber posture.

That’s where our 24/7/365 managed detection and response service comes in.

Our MDR service works by:

  • Proactively searching for threats and signs of intruders.
  • Analysing massive amounts of log data from your system, using a mixture of human and artificial intelligence to search for signs a hacker or malware may be attempting to break into (or already inside) your network.
  • Triaging these alerts to assess the risk and scale of security events.
  • Remediation – our 24/7/365 security operations centre responds to the incident and escalates to our cyber security incident response team (CSIRT).

Our MDR solution spots threats as soon as is possible (detection) and nips them in the bud (response) before they are able to develop into an issue that could harm your business.

We know that Cyber Monday is a time for heightened awareness of the risks. Whether you’re involved in online retail or not, this period sees more cyber attacks and phishing emails than the rest of the year.

Don’t risk a disaster, reach out to one of our cyber security specialists today.

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