Ransomware has become one of the most disruptive forces in global retail with nearly half of attacks on retailers in the past year ending with criminals encrypting company data. The industry is now increasingly awake to the challenge, and many retailers are already hardening their environments and improving their risk management.
In just the last 12 months, the sector has been hit by a succession of high-profile attacks affecting retailers including Marks & Spencer, Co-Op Group and Harrods. Less well known – but no less damaging – are the attacks being made on other parts of the sector and its supply chain, from cold-chain logistics and warehouse operators to payment providers and online retail platforms. According to The State Of Ransomware In Retail 2025, retailers that had data encrypted also saw a direct impact on their IT and cybersecurity teams. Nearly half of teams faced greater pressure from senior leaders, more than four in ten reported increased anxiety and long-term workload, and some saw stress-related absences. In a quarter of cases, leadership changes followed.
The threat itself is also going to continue to evolve. Criminals are using AI to automate phishing, convincingly impersonate suppliers and scale intrusion attempts. At the same time, they are exploiting the growing complexity of retail operations to find a single unpatched device or endpoint that can take an entire business offline. It is clear that resilience cannot be treated as a back-office issue. There is a need for genuine, top-down, leadership-led change – where expectations are set from the board, accountability is shared, and resilience is embedded into culture and operations. Resilience has to be built into operating models and support structures, not just technology.
Outdated systems, missed patches and unseen weaknesses – like forgotten test environments or misconfigured point-of-sale devices – build up quickly in complex estates. Retailers that prioritise cyber hygiene, continuous visibility and rapid remediation are already shrinking their attack surfaces and recovering faster when incidents occur. To turn resilience from an aspiration into measurable reduction of ransomware risk, retailers need three foundations: estate-wide visibility, automated patching and a Zero Trust approach to access.
Estate-wide visibility
The first is to create an accurate picture of the entire IT estate. No retailer can defend what it cannot see, which is why real-time visibility is the foundation of modern cyber defence.
Retailers need a clear, always-up-to-date view of every endpoint in their environment – from in-store tills and handheld scanners to back-office servers, laptops and warehouse devices. That means knowing what exists, what condition it’s in and what software it’s running.This is often where the biggest blind spots lie, because many organisations still depend on static inventories and infrequent scans instead of real-time data.
Crucially, this level of visibility gives IT teams confidence in the data they’re working from. When you can trust what you’re seeing across every endpoint, you can prioritise fixes faster, avoid wasted effort and make risk decisions that stand up at board level. It also frees teams from constant firefighting, so they can spend more time strengthening architecture, testing response plans and working with the business on longer-term resilience.
Automated patching
The next task is to ensure that systems remain secure, up-to-date and fully patched. Automated patching allows retailers to fix vulnerabilities quickly and consistently without disrupting operations. It’s extremely important when IT downtime is estimated to cost UK businesses an average of around £258,000 per hour in lost revenue, productivity and recovery costs
This matters because attackers constantly scan for unpatched systems across retail networks, where a single missed update on a back-office server or delivery-tracking device can be all it takes to create havoc. And it goes without saying that if criminals are using automation to scale their operation, retailers also need to use a similar approach to blunt attacks.
That’s the direction of travel for autonomous IT: using trusted, real-time data to automatically detect, prioritise and remediate issues across the estate. Done with human oversight, it delivers machine-speed response without sacrificing control. In practice, it means fewer manual fire drills and a faster path from exposure to resolution.
Multi-factor authentication
Finally, once retailers have full visibility and have closed the obvious entry points, the next priority is to ensure that only the right people can access critical systems and devices.
Strengthening identity security through multi-factor authentication (MFA) is the simplest and most effective step. By requiring a second verification check – whether a one-time code, an app prompt or a hardware token – MFA makes it far harder for attackers to use stolen or reused passwords to break in. This matters because stolen credentials remain one of the most common ways ransomware groups infiltrate retail systems.
But if retailers really want to stay ahead and help protect their staff from the anxiety and pressure that follow an attack, they need to equip teams with the right tools. Automation does not just improve patching; it also provides the speed and consistency needed to detect anomalies, respond to phishing attempts and address threats before they escalate.
I’ve already mentioned automation in terms of patching. But it’s also now essential to achieve the speed and consistency required to respond to cyber threats in areas such as anomaly detection and phishing attempts.
This shift also demands a new mindset. Reactive defence is no longer enough. Proactive resilience means acting instantly on accurate, real-time data and having confidence that it reflects reality across the whole estate. Ultimately, this ability to respond at speed turns day-to-day operations into true resilience. As threats continue to evolve, retailers that adopt this approach will be better placed to stay secure and operational.
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