Retail Cybersecurity Statistics 2026–2027
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Marcus Chen | Last updated: November 14, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report counted 997 retail security incidents, and 806 of them (80.8%) were confirmed data disclosures, against about 50% in the two previous editions. Axis Intelligence Research’s new Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI) reads 121.3: retail’s ransomware entry points are 23% more exposed than the cross-sector baseline, its bill only 1.7% above.
Quick Answer
Retailers lose the ransomware fight at the door, not in the bill, which is the pattern across retail cyber attacks in 2026. Exploited vulnerabilities started 26% of retail attacks against 18% cross-sector, 62% of attacks encrypted data, and recovery averaged 2.54 weeks at $1.76 million before any ransom. The median ransom paid was $57,500, against $769,000 across sectors.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates that 80.8% of retail security incidents in Verizon’s 2026 report were confirmed data disclosures (806 of 997), up from 50.1% (419 of 837) in the 2025 edition.
- Axis Intelligence Research’s Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI) is 121.3: retail’s entry-point score is 123.3 against a cross-sector baseline of 100, while its post-attack bill score is 101.7.
- Exploited vulnerabilities started 26% of ransomware attacks on retailers in Sophos’s 2026 survey, the highest of any sector and 8 points above the 18% cross-sector rate.
- Retail’s median ransom payment was $57,500, which Axis Intelligence Research calculates as 7.5% of the $769,000 cross-sector median, even as 62% of retail attacks encrypted data, up from 48%.
- Comparitech’s tracker logged 326 ransomware attacks on retailers in H1 2026, up 28% on H2 2025, and retail attacks in Q3 2026 were up 97% on Q3 2025.
How Many Retailers Get Attacked?
No source counts “retailers attacked”, and retail sector cyber attacks are measured four different ways. Four trackers count four different things, and their numbers should never be added together.
| Instrument | What it counts | Retail reading | Window | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verizon DBIR | Security incidents, and incidents with confirmed data disclosure, reported by contributors (NAICS 44–45) | 997 incidents; 806 confirmed | Nov 2024 to Oct 2025 | Verizon 2026 DBIR executive summary |
| Comparitech ransomware tracker | Attacks claimed on leak sites or confirmed by the victim | 326 attacks, 28 confirmed | H1 2026 | Comparitech H1 2026 roundup |
| Comparitech ransomware tracker | Same | +97% year over year | Q3 2026 | Comparitech Q3 2026 roundup |
| Orange Cyberdefense | Confirmed cyber-extortion victims | 311 victims, +84% | Oct 2024 to Sep 2025 | Security Navigator 2026: Retail in Focus |
Verizon’s full report states the incident window as November 1, 2024 to October 31, 2025; the executive summary text describes it loosely as October 2024 through November 2025.
Comparitech’s count is a count of claims. Only 28 of the 326 retail attacks (8.6%, an Axis Intelligence Research calculation) were confirmed by the victim, and Comparitech notes that claims often surface about a month after the attack, so monthly figures can shift.
Is retail breached more often when it is attacked?
Yes, and the change in one year is large. Axis Intelligence Research divides confirmed data disclosures by incidents for each Verizon edition. For the 2026 edition: 806 ÷ 997 × 100 = 80.8%.
| Verizon edition | Retail incidents | Confirmed data disclosures | Confirmed share of incidents (%) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 725 | 369 | 50.9 | RH-ISAC reading of Verizon; share is an Axis calculation |
| 2025 | 837 | 419 | 50.1 | Verizon 2025 DBIR retail snapshot; share is an Axis calculation |
| 2026 | 997 | 806 | 80.8 | Verizon 2026 DBIR executive summary; share is an Axis calculation |
Retail incidents rose 19.1% between the 2025 and 2026 editions, while confirmed breaches rose 1.92 times and the confirmed share climbed 30.8 percentage points. For comparison, all industries in the same edition convert 71.0% of incidents (22,625 of 31,861), so retail sits 9.8 percentage points above the cross-industry rate. The 80.8% is the Conversion input of the Industry Breach Exposure Index (IBEX™) on our cybersecurity statistics by industry page, where retail ranks first of five industries at 63.35.
Marcus Chen’s read: Conversion is the part a defender controls, and the best single measure of retail data security. An incident that does not convert was contained before data left the building, so a swing from one in two to four in five means containment failed more often once an adversary was inside. Verizon’s sample is built from what its contributors see, so the jump describes their caseload, not every retailer; it is still the largest single-year movement in this dataset.
Is retail the most attacked sector?
Not by volume, on any instrument we could read. Axis Intelligence Research’s ranking of Verizon’s 2026 industry table puts retail ninth of 20 named industries by incidents (997 of 31,861, or 3.1%) and eleventh by confirmed breaches (806 of 22,625, or 3.6%). Comparitech’s H1 2026 roundup puts retail third of six business sub-sectors, behind manufacturing (822 attacks) and service-based businesses (609). What the data does support is acceleration: Orange Cyberdefense reports that retail saw the single largest year-on-year surge in cyber-extortion victims of any industry it analysed. For a composite view, see the IBEX ranking on our cybersecurity statistics by industry page.
How Do Attackers Get Into Retailers?
Through a flaw first, a person second. Verizon’s 2026 data shows vulnerability exploitation as the initial access vector in 42% of retail breaches, credential abuse in 14% and phishing in 9%. Three patterns, System Intrusion, Basic Web Application Attacks and Social Engineering, account for 95% of retail breaches, and external actors are behind 99%.
Three independent instruments describe the door differently because they start from different populations. Axis Intelligence Research sets them side by side and does not blend them.
| Source | Population | What it found | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verizon 2026 DBIR | Retail breaches, all causes | Exploitation 42%, credential abuse 14%, phishing 9% (together 65%, an Axis sum of the three vectors Verizon prints) | Verizon |
| Sophos 2026 | Retail ransomware victims, n=217, fieldwork Jan–Mar 2026 | Phishing 29%, exploited vulnerabilities 26%, malicious email 22% (together 77%, an Axis sum); identity-based vectors started 69% of attacks | Sophos |
| Thales 2026 retail edition | 426 retail IT and security respondents | Human error 27% of data breach causes, exploitation of known vulnerabilities 22% | Thales |
The instruments disagree on which vector leads, because Verizon counts every breach and Sophos counts only ransomware victims. They agree on what is distinctive. Verizon ranks exploitation first for retail, and in Sophos’s survey exploited vulnerabilities began 26% of retail attacks, the highest of any sector, against 18% across sectors. Retail also posts the lowest identity-based share of any sector in Sophos’s data (69%). Axis Intelligence Research’s reading: retail’s ransomware door skews toward a flaw an attacker can reach, not toward a stolen identity.
What do attackers take from retailers?
| Measure (share of retail breaches) | 2025 edition (%) | 2026 edition (%) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal data compromised | 65 | 84 | Verizon 2025 retail snapshot, 2026 summary |
| Credentials compromised | 26 | 26 | same |
| Espionage motive | 9 | 19 | same |
| External actors | 96 | 99 | same |
The 2026 summary also lists secrets (20%) and a remainder category (14%), and financial motive at 85%. Internal data rose 19 points while credentials stayed flat, and the espionage motive doubled. Retail breaches are increasingly about the company’s own files; credentials, at 26%, did not move.
Marcus Chen’s read: A rise in internal data and secrets points to lateral movement after the first foothold: the attacker gets onto a server through an exposed service, then walks to file shares, repositories and key stores. That is an attack-surface and segmentation problem: dwell time before detection decides how far the attacker spreads, and the data at risk is the retailer’s own estate, not only what shoppers type into a checkout.
Which Cyber Threats Hit Retailers Hardest Right Now?
Ransomware and cyber extortion
Comparitech logged 326 attacks on retailers in H1 2026, up 28% from 254 in H2 2025 (Axis Intelligence Research arithmetic: 326 ÷ 254 − 1 = 28.3%). Q3 2026 was steeper: Comparitech reports retail attacks up 97% on Q3 2025, and Chain Store Age’s October 7, 2026 report on the tracker gives 199 attacks against 154 in Q2 2026 and 101 in Q3 2025. That one quarter equals 61% of the whole first half (199 ÷ 326). Add H1 and Q3 and retailers stand at 525 claimed attacks after nine months; if Q4 merely matches Q3, 2026 closes at 724. That is an arithmetic scenario, not a forecast.
Orange Cyberdefense counts differently, by confirmed cyber-extortion victims: 311 retail victims between October 2024 and September 2025, up 84%. Orange does not print the prior-year count; 311 ÷ 1.84 implies about 169, an Axis Intelligence Research estimate. For the cross-sector picture, see our ransomware statistics page.
Third-party and supply-chain exposure
Third parties were involved in 68% of retail breaches in Verizon’s 2026 data, against 48% across all industries: 20 points higher, or 1.42 times. In Thales’s retail survey, 66% of retail organizations reported an increase in third-party vulnerabilities (54% a year earlier), and the average retailer runs 88 SaaS applications.
Marcus Chen’s read: For a retailer the attack surface is the vendor graph: payment processors, marketing scripts, logistics portals, helpdesk platforms. Each of the 88 is a tenant whose identity controls and patching cadence the retailer does not run, and 68% is what that dependence looks like in retail data breach statistics.
Identity abuse and helpdesk social engineering
Credential abuse started 14% of retail breaches and phishing 9% in Verizon’s 2026 data. Thales found 71% of retail organizations reporting an increase in credential theft against cloud management infrastructure, up from 66%. The most-cited UK case points the same way: the Cyber Monitoring Centre said, in June 2025, that the M&S and Co-op incidents were believed to have begun with social engineering, with compromised credentials and potential abuse of IT helpdesk processes reported, and that attribution was ongoing. For the wider picture, see our credential attack statistics and phishing statistics pages.
AI, deepfakes and reputational attacks
48% of retail respondents in Thales’s survey had experienced deepfake attacks or reputational damage from AI-generated misinformation. 32% have a dedicated AI security budget, up from 19% a year earlier. See our deepfake fraud statistics page for the consumer side.
What Does a Retail Cyberattack Cost?
A mid-sized retailer hit by ransomware spent a mean of $1.76 million on recovery in 2026, before any ransom. That is Sophos’s figure for retail (up from $1.65 million, a 6.7% rise by Axis Intelligence Research’s arithmetic), against $1.70 million across sectors. Sophos surveys organizations of 100 to 5,000 employees, which is why the large listed retailers below sit at a different order of magnitude.
What did the big UK retail incidents cost?
| Event | Measure | Amount | Source | Dated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| M&S | Incident-related costs inside adjusting items, year to March 28, 2026 | £131.3m | M&S full year results | May 20, 2026 |
| M&S | Insurance proceeds, recorded in adjusted profit | £100.0m | same | May 20, 2026 |
| Co-op | Estimated direct impact on revenue | £285m | Co-op 2025 trading update | March 26, 2026 |
| Co-op | Estimated impact on profitability (£86m margin + £21m incremental non-recurring costs) | £107m | same | March 26, 2026 |
| M&S and Co-op combined | Independent estimate of total financial impact, Category 2 systemic event | £270m to £440m | Cyber Monitoring Centre | June 20, 2025 |
Co-op figures are unaudited estimates. The CMC excluded ransom payments and based its analysis on data to June 10, 2025. M&S’s release does not say how much of its wider profit movement is due to the incident, and this page does not allocate it.
Axis Intelligence Research divides Co-op’s two published estimates: £107m ÷ £285m = 37.5%, so each pound of revenue lost to the incident cost about 37.5 pence of profit.
The CMC’s breakdown explains why the bill is so large. Lost sales were the bulk of the cost. Using transaction data from Fable Data, it found M&S’s average daily spend fell 22% while online shopping was unavailable, with online sales near zero and in-store sales down almost 15%, and Co-op’s average daily spend fell 11% in the first 30 days.
Marcus Chen’s read: A survey mean of $1.76 million measures what it costs to bring systems back; Co-op’s and M&S’s numbers are dominated by the days the business could not trade. Those are different bills. A retailer that models its cyber exposure on recovery cost alone is pricing the smaller one. IBM’s per-breach figure and Sophos’s recovery figure also answer different questions: one prices a data breach end to end, the other the cleanup after a ransomware attack.
A third instrument prices the whole breach, not only the recovery. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 puts the average retail breach at $3.80 million, up 7.3% from $3.54 million, against a record $4.99 million across industries. Retail is the second-cheapest of 17 industries per breach (only the public sector, at $3.50 million, is lower), at 76.2% of the global average by Axis Intelligence Research’s arithmetic. IBM also reports that 61% of retail breaches in its sample were malicious or criminal attacks, against 55% overall. Retail is about 4% of IBM’s 602 organizations, so treat the sector figure as indicative.
For cost by sector and company size, see our ransomware attack cost and ransomware recovery cost pages.
How Long Does a Retailer Take to Recover?
2.54 weeks on average in 2026, down from 3.16 weeks, and 56% of retail victims were fully recovered within a week, according to Sophos. The cross-sector average is 2.80 weeks. Sophos calls the one-week share the highest in five years of its retail data.
| Measure (retail) | 2025 | 2026 | Cross-sector 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average time to fully recover (weeks) | 3.16 | 2.54 | 2.80 | Sophos |
| Restored data from backups (%) | 62 | 71 | 66 | same |
| Attacks that encrypted data (%) | 48 | 62 | 56 | same |
| Encrypted and data also stolen (%) | 14 | 19 | n/a | same |
Recovery got faster (down 19.6%, an Axis calculation) while attacks became likelier to succeed: encryption rose 14 points, and attacks that also stole data rose 5. Backups are working, and they are not stopping the attack from reaching the encryption stage. For recovery economics across industries, the Axis ransomware recovery cost page carries the RCRI™ score.
Marcus Chen’s read: Faster recovery with higher encryption means defenders improved restore capability while detection and containment lagged. The 19% of attacks that combine encryption with theft matter most: a clean restore from backup does nothing about stolen data, so those victims face the extortion leg anyway.
Do Retailers Pay the Ransom?
Rarely, and for far less. Sophos’s all-sector report puts retail’s payment rate at 32% of victims whose data was encrypted, the lowest of any sector; local and state government is highest at 72%. Our ransomware statistics page owns that registry figure.
| Measure | Retail | Cross-sector | Retail as % of cross-sector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Median ransom demand | $225,000 | $698,000 | 32.2 | Sophos; ratio is an Axis calculation |
| Median ransom payment | $57,500 | $769,000 | 7.5 | same |
Retail’s median payment is 25.6% of its median demand (57,500 ÷ 225,000). The two medians come from different respondent subsets, so read the ratio as indicative.
Marcus Chen’s read: Low payments are not low impact. Retail pays little because it can often restore from backup and because its costs sit in downtime, not in the ransom. The cheap ransom is the smallest line on the invoice.
What Is the Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI)?
The Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI) is an Axis Intelligence Research score that compares how open retail’s door is with how heavy retail’s bill is, each measured against the cross-sector baseline from the same Sophos survey. A reading above 100 means retail’s entry points are more exposed than its post-attack costs are heavy.
Formula:
RRAI = Door score ÷ Bill score × 100
- Door score = mean of three ratios, each retail ÷ cross-sector × 100: exploited-vulnerability root cause, known security gap cited as a cause, and attacks that encrypted data despite a firewall alert.
- Bill score = mean of three ratios on the same basis: share of attacks that encrypted data, mean recovery cost excluding ransom, and time to fully recover.
Equal weights inside each group. All inputs come from Sophos’s State of Ransomware in Retail 2026 (retail n=217, fieldwork January to March 2026).
| Group | Component | Retail | Cross-sector | Ratio (cross-sector = 100) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Door | Exploited vulnerability as root cause | 26% | 18% | 144.4 |
| Door | Known security gap cited as cause | 38% | 36% | 105.6 |
| Door | Encrypted despite a firewall alert | 60% | 50% | 120.0 |
| Door score | 123.3 | |||
| Bill | Data encrypted | 62% | 56% | 110.7 |
| Bill | Mean recovery cost, excluding ransom | $1.76M | $1.70M | 103.5 |
| Bill | Time to fully recover | 2.54 weeks | 2.80 weeks | 90.7 |
| Bill score | 101.7 | |||
| RRAI | 123.3 ÷ 101.7 × 100 | 121.3 |
Worked example: Door = (144.4 + 105.6 + 120.0) ÷ 3 = 123.3. Bill = (110.7 + 103.5 + 90.7) ÷ 3 = 101.7. RRAI = 123.3 ÷ 101.65 × 100 = 121.3.
What it says. Retail’s entry points score 23.3% above the baseline; its bill scores 1.7% above. Recovery time is the one input below 100: retail restores faster than most. The loss is front-loaded at the door, which is where a retailer has the most control.
How stable it is. Dropping any one of the six components leaves the RRAI between 110.9 and 130.1; moving “data encrypted” from the Bill group to the Door group gives 123.7. Every variant stays above 100.
What it leaves out on purpose. Median ransom demand (32.2% of the cross-sector median) and median ransom payment (7.5%) are shown above and kept out of the composite: ratios that extreme, taken from medians, would dominate a mean of ratios and measure negotiation, not exposure.
What it is not. All six inputs describe organizations that were hit. The RRAI describes how retail ransomware attacks unfold, not how likely a retailer is to be hit. This is the baseline reading; Axis Intelligence Research will publish a second reading when Sophos releases its next retail edition.
Marcus Chen’s read: An index above 100 on the door side and near 100 on the bill side is a patching-cadence and exposure-management finding. Retail pays about what everyone pays once attackers are in; it simply lets them in more often through things that were already known and reachable. Fix the door and the asymmetry closes.
What Changes for Retailers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Bot traffic overtakes shoppers’ share of attention. Radware’s analysis of Cyber 5 2025, the Thursday-to-Monday run from Thanksgiving (November 27, 2025) to Cyber Monday (December 1, 2025), found bad bots made up 43% of all traffic to the e-commerce retailers it protects, against 46% from human shoppers. A year earlier bad bots were 31%: a 12-point rise.
| Date, 2026 | Day | Event | Days from publication | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 26 | Thursday | U.S. Thanksgiving, the start of Cyber 5 | 12 | Axis calculation |
| Nov 27 | Friday | Black Friday | 13 | Axis calculation |
| Nov 30 | Monday | Cyber Monday | 16 | Axis calculation |
| Radware Cyber 5 2025 reading | Value | Comparison | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bad bots, share of traffic | 43% | 31% a year earlier | Radware |
| Human shoppers, share of traffic | 46% | n/a | same |
| Bad-bot traffic that was low in sophistication | close to 70% | 44% a year earlier | same |
| Price scraping | 5 billion detected attacks | no baseline given | same |
| Account takeover, one large multinational retailer | more than 5 times | year over year | same |
| Carding, same retailer | roughly 15 times | previous season | same |
| Account takeover attempts, one retailer | about +1,100% | four days before Black Friday; baseline not stated | same |
Radware does not disclose the number of retailers or the sample size. The account-takeover and carding multiples describe single retailers.
Across the whole web, Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report puts bots above 53% of traffic in 2025, up from 51% in 2024. For what shoppers and sales do in the same days, see our Black Friday statistics and Cyber Monday statistics; for the shopper-side fraud that follows, our holiday scam statistics.
Marcus Chen’s read: Close to 70% of that bad-bot traffic was low-sophistication automation, which is cheap to launch at scale, and peak-season demand makes it harder to separate from shoppers. A surge in account takeover attempts four days before Black Friday is consistent with credentials being tested ahead of the peak, though Radware does not state the cause. The lesson for peak-week staffing is that the bot defence tuning has to be done before Thursday, not on it.
How Do Bots, Account Takeover and E-Skimming Hit Online Stores?
E-commerce cybersecurity comes down to three separate pressures on the same pages: bots on the front door (price scraping, fake accounts, carding), account takeover on the login, and e-skimming on the payment page, where a malicious script is injected to copy card details as shoppers type them.
Only the third has a regulatory control with a date. PCI DSS v4.0 introduced 64 new requirements, 51 of them future-dated to March 31, 2025, and Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 deal with the scripts on payment pages. The PCI Security Standards Council has published guidance, “Payment Page Security and Preventing E-Skimming”, for merchants and service providers, and has revised its SAQ A self-assessment questionnaire to drop the two requirements for merchants that qualify for it. Which questionnaire applies decides whether the requirements bind a given retailer.
For the payment-fraud side of online retail, see our payment fraud statistics and e-commerce statistics pages.
What Does 2027 Look Like for Retail Cybersecurity?
Two regulatory clocks are running and several datasets refresh. The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act reporting obligations have applied since September 11, 2026, and the European Commission says they cover all in-scope products with digital elements, including those already on the market. The main obligations apply from December 11, 2027. For retailers that make, import or distribute connected products, that is a 2027 project. PCI DSS’s future-dated requirements have been in force since March 31, 2025.
| 2027 reading to watch | What it settles | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026 (Nov 27 and 30) | Whether Radware’s 43% bad-bot share holds | Peak-season bot defence |
| Comparitech Q4 2026 roundup | Whether Q3’s 199 retail attacks was a peak or a level | 525 claims after nine months; 724 if Q4 equals Q3 |
| Verizon 2027 DBIR | Whether retail’s confirmed share stays near 81% | Containment trend |
| Sophos’s next State of Ransomware in Retail | Second RRAI reading | Whether the door is closing |
For sector-wide direction, see our cybersecurity trends page.
Methodology
Collection. Axis Intelligence Research read every source on this page on November 14, 2026 and logged each figure in the CSV with its URL and retrieval date. Primary sources: Verizon’s 2026 DBIR (executive summary, full report industry table and retail chapter) and 2025 retail snapshot, IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026, Sophos’s retail and all-sector ransomware reports, Comparitech’s quarterly roundups, Orange Cyberdefense’s Security Navigator, Thales’s retail data threat report, Radware, Imperva, the Cyber Monitoring Centre, M&S and Co-op’s own releases, the PCI Security Standards Council and the European Commission. Rows that come from a secondary reading (RH-ISAC’s reading of Verizon’s 2024 edition, Chain Store Age’s reading of Comparitech’s tracker) are flagged is_primary = no.
Confirmed share of incidents. Verizon confirmed data disclosures ÷ incidents × 100, per edition.
Retail ÷ cross-sector ratios. Retail value ÷ cross-sector value × 100, using the pair printed in the same Sophos report. Mean recovery cost uses $1.76M and $1.70M as printed in the retail report.
RRAI. Defined above. Door score and Bill score are unweighted means of three ratios each; RRAI = Door ÷ Bill × 100. The robustness range comes from dropping each of the six components in turn, and one reclassification of the encryption component.
Estimates. Orange Cyberdefense’s prior-year victim count (about 169) is an Axis estimate from its printed +84%. The 724-attack 2026 figure is an arithmetic scenario in which Q4 equals Q3. Co-op’s cost figures are Co-op’s own unaudited estimates.
What we did not merge. Verizon incidents, Comparitech claims and Orange extortion victims count different events and are shown side by side. Verizon’s all-industry exploitation figure (31%) comes from a narrower subset of breaches than retail’s 42%, so the comparison is directional. Survey respondents in Sophos’s and Thales’s reports describe their own organizations.
About This Dataset
The CSV holds 296 rows covering Verizon’s retail counts and breach patterns across three editions, the Sophos retail and cross-sector pairs with prior-year values, the full RRAI computation with its robustness checks, Comparitech and Orange Cyberdefense counts, Thales survey results, Radware and Imperva bot readings, company and independent cost estimates, PCI and EU dates, and the Black Friday calendar. Each row carries source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary and axis_calculated, and every Axis calculation carries a method_note.
License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, Retail Cybersecurity Statistics 2026–2027, 2026.
Cite This Research
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Chen, M. (2026, November 14). Retail cybersecurity statistics 2026–2027: Attacks, entry points, costs and the Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI). Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/retail-cybersecurity-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research, and Marcus Chen. “Retail Cybersecurity Statistics 2026–2027: Attacks, Entry Points, Costs and the Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI).” Axis Intelligence, 14 Nov. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/retail-cybersecurity-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and Marcus Chen. “Retail Cybersecurity Statistics 2026–2027: Attacks, Entry Points, Costs and the Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI).” Axis Intelligence, November 14, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/retail-cybersecurity-statistics/.
Embed-ready line: “Axis Intelligence Research’s Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index (RRAI) finds retail’s ransomware entry points 23.3% more exposed than the cross-sector baseline, while its post-attack bill sits 1.7% above it.”
Questions People Ask About Retail Cyber Attacks
How many retail companies get breached each year?
No source counts retailers. Verizon’s 2026 report recorded 997 retail security incidents, 806 with confirmed data disclosure (80.8%). Comparitech logged 326 ransomware attacks on retailers in H1 2026, only 28 confirmed by the victim, and Orange Cyberdefense counted 311 retail cyber-extortion victims in the year to September 2025.
How did attackers get into M&S and Co-op?
The Cyber Monitoring Centre said in June 2025 that the initial access was believed to involve social engineering, with compromised credentials and potential abuse of IT helpdesk processes reported, and that attribution was ongoing. It classed the two incidents as one Category 2 systemic event with an estimated £270 million to £440 million total impact.
How much does a ransomware attack cost a retailer?
Sophos’s 2026 survey puts the mean recovery cost for retail at $1.76 million excluding any ransom. For large listed retailers the figures are far higher: Co-op estimates a £107 million profit impact and £285 million of lost revenue, and M&S reported £131.3 million of incident-related costs against £100.0 million of insurance proceeds.
Do retailers pay ransoms?
Fewer than other sectors. Sophos’s all-sector report puts retail’s payment rate at 32% of victims with encrypted data, the lowest of any sector. The retail median payment was $57,500 against a $769,000 cross-sector median, and the median demand was $225,000 against $698,000.
Does multi-factor authentication stop ransomware in retail?
Not on its own. Sophos found 97% of retail victims of credential-based attacks had multi-factor authentication enabled, and more than half still had data encrypted. In the same survey, exploited vulnerabilities, which MFA does not address, started 26% of retail attacks.
What changes for retailers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Bot traffic. Radware found bad bots were 43% of traffic to the e-commerce retailers it protects during Cyber 5 2025, against 46% from human shoppers and 31% bad bots a year earlier. Black Friday 2026 is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30.
Which PCI DSS requirements address e-skimming on checkout pages?
Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, both part of PCI DSS v4.0’s 64 new requirements, of which 51 were future-dated to March 31, 2025. They cover the scripts that run on payment pages. The PCI Security Standards Council has revised SAQ A to remove them for merchants that qualify for that questionnaire.
What does the Retail Ransomware Asymmetry Index measure?
The RRAI compares how open retail’s ransomware entry points are with how heavy the post-attack bill is, each against the cross-sector baseline of 100 from the same Sophos survey. The baseline reading is 121.3: a door score of 123.3 and a bill score of 101.7, built from six retail-versus-cross-sector ratios.