The National Retail Federation is forming a partnership with the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) to boost the industry’s efforts to combat malicious cyberattacks and better protect customer data, the group announced Tuesday.
NRF, the world’s largest retail trade association, and RH-ISAC will share threat intelligence, plan virtual threat exercises, coordinate efforts with federal regulators and collaborate on research related to cybersecurity.
The partnership comes at a time of heightened threat activity against the retail sector following an accelerated consumer shift to omnichannel purchasing as the economy recovers from multiple years of impact from the global pandemic.
“From a cyber standpoint it’s really about protecting the entire enterprise,” said Christian Beckner, VP for retail technology and cybersecurity at NRF. “Making sure you’re having that sort of seamless security between your store operations, your e-commerce operations, your supply chain and everything else you’re doing from an enterprise standpoint.”
A November report from Veracode indicated three-fourths of retail and hospitality applications contained security vulnerabilities, and one in five of those vulnerabilities were considered high severity.
NRF will phase out its existing threat sharing portal, the NRF Cyber Risk Exchange, as it ramps up the collaboration with RH-ISAC. The two organizations already have a large number of members who participate in each organization, including medium to large-sized retailers.
“What we will help bring to the table is the information and intelligence of the threat sharing that goes along with our member companies,” said Suzie Squier, president of RH-ISAC.
