When it rains, it pours.
That phrase defined retail cybersecurity in 2025. What began as isolated incidents quickly became prolonged, intense disruptions, exposing just how interconnected — and fragile — modern retail operations really are.
CTO and Co-Founder at Armis.
Over the year, high-profile retailers around the world were hit. Luxury global brands like Gucci and Balenciaga suffered data breaches; Victoria’s Secret was forced to temporarily shut down parts of its digital operations. While Marks & Spencer, Co-Op and Harrods in the UK all faced incidents, with disruption for M&S lasting for 15 weeks.
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Different triggers, same outcome: major disruption and financial loss.
But when disruption spreads this quickly and lingers this long, it stops being about individual attacks and starts raising a more uncomfortable question: why was retail such fertile ground for them in the first place?
Why disruption spread so easily
While the volume of retailers hit in 2025 might have felt anomalous, it makes sense when viewed through this lens: retail is one of the most effective sectors for causing maximum disruption at scale. The cyberattack on United Natural Foods, a key supplier to tens of thousands of grocery stores across North America, showed how a single compromise can ripple outward – emptying shelves, disrupting lives, and triggering wider economic impact.
But it wasn’t simply a lack of security investment that caught out countless retailers last year, it was the sheer scale of cyber exposure retailers are now dealing with. The most disruptive incidents of the year weren’t driven by sophisticated zero-day exploits, but by attackers exploiting complexity and that lack of contextual understanding around how systems, assets and users interact.
Retailers operate sprawling digital ecosystems that combine ecommerce platforms, cloud infrastructure, in-store operational technology, identity systems, and third-party services. Each connection improves efficiency and scale — but also introduces new exposure and risk. A weakness in one area, whether a supplier, a trusted integration or an unmanaged asset, can quickly cascade into widespread disruption.
Attackers are increasingly adept at exploiting these conditions, too. Rather than targeting a single critical vulnerability, they chain together lower-risk weaknesses, move laterally across environments or providers and take advantage of fragmented visibility between IT, cloud storage and operational systems. The Adidas breach is a clear example: attackers gained access via a third-party supplier, stole customer data and demonstrated how interconnected environments can amplify impact.
And every incident that occurred last year was enabled by the realities of modern retail operations. New systems are deployed quickly, integrations are prioritized over security hygiene, and legacy infrastructure often sits alongside modern cloud services.
This creates blind spots that attackers can exploit long before an incident becomes visible. Security teams are left defending environments that are constantly changing, often without the visibility or intelligence needed to anticipate where risk is building. Many are under-resourced, fighting the growing threat of generative AI, all while trying to embed a culture of collaborative risk management.
After a tumultuous year, one thing is clear; this wasn’t a brief surge in activity or a single bad quarter. It was a sustained pattern of exposure playing out across the retail ecosystem. And as long as that exposure remains fragmented and poorly understood, disruption will continue to outpace response.
Cyber exposure becomes the foundation for resilience
What the past year made clear is that resilience in retail can no longer be built by reacting faster to incidents after they occur. With AI, as well as other emerging technologies becoming more mainstream, the problem is only going to get worse. The scale and persistence of disruption showed that retailers need to rethink how they understand risk in the first place.
That starts with recognizing that many of the most damaging weaknesses don’t sit in a single system or vulnerability, but in the relationships between software assets, platforms, and partners that underpin modern retail operations. This is where cyber exposure management becomes key. Rather than treating risk as a series of isolated alerts or vulnerabilities to be patched, exposure management focuses on understanding how risk originates and accumulates across an organization’s entire digital footprint.
For retailers, that footprint is uniquely complex: ecommerce platforms connect directly to inventory systems, in-store operational technology links back to central networks, identity management systems span employees, and third-party suppliers or contractors are embedded into day-to-day operations. Without a clear understanding of how these elements interact, it becomes impossible to anticipate how a seemingly minor weakness can escalate into widespread disruption.
Cyber exposure management offers a strategic approach to identifying, assessing, prioritizing and reducing cyber risk across an organization’s entire digital footprint. It’s about developing a living, contextual understanding of what assets exist, what role they play within retail operations, how critical they are during peak trading periods, and what other systems or partners they depend on – whether assets are managed or unmanaged, IT or OT, cloud-based or on-premises. This context is what separates manageable risk from systemic failure.
With attackers consistently exploiting gaps, exposure management allows organizations to assess risk in terms of real-world impact – not just technical severity – helping retailers prioritize the exposures most likely to affect operations, customer trust and revenue continuity.
This shift is ultimately about resilience, not just security maturity. By grounding risk decisions in how retail operations actually function, exposure-led approaches help teams anticipate where disruption is most likely to emerge, rather than responding after it has already taken hold. The result is more informed decision-making across IT, security and the wider business, with risk reduction aligned to operational continuity, customer experience and revenue protection.
Resilience starts before the next incident
There’s little room left for complacency. Retailers have learned the hard way that disruption doesn’t arrive in isolation, but through complex, interconnected environments – and once it begins, the impact can escalate quickly and spread far beyond the initial point of failure.
Last year was a wake-up call for the entire retail sector, not just for those that made the headlines. The challenge now is to ask harder questions about how environments are designed, how risk accumulates across systems, and whether businesses truly understand where their most critical points of exposure lie.
Because after all, when it rains, it pours. And the cost of inaction could now very well mean the difference between profit and sustained financial damage.
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