Retailers rely heavily on the year-end shopping season, but it also happens to be the period when online threats rise faster than most organizations can respond. During the rush, digital systems handle far more traffic than usual, and internal teams operate under tighter timelines. This combination creates a perfect opening for attackers who intentionally prepare their campaigns weeks in advance and deploy automated tools when stores are at their busiest.
Security analysts consistently report that fraudulent bot traffic, password-testing attempts, and customer account intrusions grow sharply during the weeks surrounding Black Friday, festive sales, and year-end shopping events. Attackers time their operations carefully because the chance of slipping through undetected is higher when systems are strained and retailers are focused on maintaining performance rather than investigating anomalies.
A critical reason criminals favor this season is the widespread reuse of passwords. Large collections of leaked usernames and passwords circulate on criminal forums, and attackers use automated software to test these combinations across retail login pages. These tools can attempt thousands of logins per minute. When one match succeeds, the attacker gains access to stored payment information, saved addresses, shopping histories, loyalty points, and in some cases stored tokenized payment methods. All of these can be exploited immediately, which makes the attack both low-effort and highly profitable.
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