Only 10% of companies will be ready for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation by the May 2018 deadline and, by the end of the year, we will see the first companies closing due to fines.

That’s a prediction from Colin Tankard, Managing Director of data security company, Digital Pathways. And here are his other nine predictions for the cyber market next year.

1. A major cloud player will be shut down for 24 hours due to a cyber attack and data loss. This will trigger users to question their providers as to levels of encryption, where are the keys held and who has access to them? There will be growth in third party security. Services such as Bring Your Own Key (BOYE) will be the mantra, as companies will no longer trust a single cloud vendor and will spread their data around a number of providers.
2. IOT security will remain weak, even with the launch of light encryption. This will be due to manufactures still using old chipsets that have security flaws.
3. Email security will be one of the fastest growing areas in data security as ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks increase and more companies are fined, due to leaked data from intercepted emails or, rogue emails being received.
4. There is likely to be a grave shortage of skilled staff to plug the GDPR need, especially in the rise of the Data Protection Officer, now mandatory within the GDPR regulations.
5. Voice recognition will be widely deployed as a form of two-factor authentication, given the improvements in Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google.
6. At present around 31% of companies pay ransom-ware demands. This will reach 50% in 2018.
7. File-less attacks will be the new attack Trojan. These viruses reside in the memory of the PC and remain there until it is rebooted. Normal AV will not detect these attacks.
8. Social engineering attacks will increase as a way to get into an organisation. This will lead to an increase in detection systems being deployed inside an organisation so as to spot unusual behaviour, both in people and systems.
9. We will all start calling our cars KIT as we move into the driverless era!

Optiseller, a new e-commerce data platform from Developing IT, used this year’s Black Friday as an opportunity to look at how some of the largest sellers on eBay UK performed on what is thought to be one of their most important trading periods of the year.

Using their off-the-shelf ‘Optiseller eBay Competitor Performance Dashboard’, which they say takes just minutes to set up, requires no accredited access to the target account or accounts, and provides results within hours, the team of e-commerce experts at Optiseller concluded that Black Friday isn’t yet as important to all sellers as you might expect. They analysed why this might be, and came up with these insights.

Declan Power, Optiseller COO said:

“Over the weekend we looked at a mix of top 10 and top 100 eBay sellers across different categories such as fashion, tech, and home and garden and monitored their performance. These included household names such as Tesco, Argos, Littlewoods, Currys PC World, and Superdry, as well as some perhaps less obvious but significant eBay sellers such as ‘ppretail’ (Home & Garden) and ‘kenable_ltd’ (Computers). What we discovered was:

• Despite the perception that Black Friday is a boon for all online retailers, performance across the test sample was mixed at best. While 30% of sellers experienced a significant uplift (more than 10%) in sales volume over the period, and another 30% experienced a more moderate (more than 3%) sales uplift, the remaining 40% of sellers saw little or no increase in sales performance over the weekend.
• Those sellers who saw the greatest increase in sales volumes were also typically those who led the way in adaption of Optiseller recommended KPIs such as:
  • eBay Markdown Manager (Discounts)
  • Multiple Shipping Options including Click & Collect
  • Image Variation
  • Title Optimisation (Length and Item Specifics)
  • Item Specifics
  • Buyer Protection
• For some sellers, it doesn’t appear to make sense to actively discount and promote for Black Friday:
  • Commodities and seasonal stock such as IT peripherals and home and garden product lines don’t appear to sell well on Black Friday. This may be due to lack of consumer demand, or a reluctance by sellers to discount and promote such items in the belief this is more likely to displace future sales rather than generate additional growth.
  • For clearance channel sellers, lack of stock depth may preclude participation.

Therefore, while Black Friday can certainly be beneficial for eBay sellers, it pays to consider whether it suits your business, and if you are going to participate. Apart from ensuring the correct offering is available, it also pays to track and manage those key performance indicators which can make a big weekend even bigger.”

Black Friday is now a big event for consumers in many leading economies but Cyber Monday has yet to catch on.

An international survey in the week before Black Friday 2017 which asked participants “which shopping event have you been waiting for this year?” found the most popular event was Black Friday.

The online survey, conducted last month among 3,400 participants from eight developed countries, the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan, revealed that Black Friday enjoys a double-digit popularity percentage in seven of the countries, while Cyber Monday tops out at only 4% outside of North America.

One Hour Translation, the translation agency which conducted the poll, allowed respondents to pick more than one answer to the question which shopping event they had been anticipating. 1,000 of the participants were from the US, 600 from the UK and 300 from each of the other six countries.

In the United States, 14.5% of respondents said they were waiting for Black Friday, which took place on November 24 this year, while 16% were waiting for Cyber Monday (November 27). Black Friday is particularly popular in Canada (about 26%), Spain (about 22%), France (about 21%), the UK and Germany (about 19% each) and to a lesser extent in Australia and Japan (about 10% in each country). On average among the 8 countries sampled in the survey, 17% of respondents were looking forward to Black Friday, compared to about 8% who were looking forward to Cyber Monday and about 3% who were looking forward to the Singles Day event (the Chinese holiday celebrating single people) – making Black Friday a significant shopping event outside the US.

Cyber Monday, on the other hand, enjoyed a double-digit popularity percentage only in the North American countries. 16% of respondents in the United States said they were waiting for Cyber Monday, and 10% of respondents in Canada, figures that were much higher compared to the ones observed in the UK (about 4%), Australia, Germany, Spain, France and Japan (about 3%).

The Chinese “Singles Day” shopping event, which takes place every year on November 11, was highly anticipated among 7.5% of respondents in Japan, as opposed to approximately 6% in Spain and France, 4% in Canada, 3% in Germany, 2% in Britain and Australia, and only 1.4% in the United States.

Despite the fact that the survey was conducted online and was naturally geared towards online consumers, about two thirds of respondents (68%) on average among the eight countries said that they were not looking forward to any online shopping events. About 4% of the 3,400 respondents said they were looking forward to shopping events other than those examined in the survey.

Ofer Shoshan, co-founder and CEO of One Hour Translation, commented: “we would encourage e-commerce companies outside of North America to invest in associating their activity and their brand with the Cyber Monday event.”

The communications platform Gnatta is reporting a shift towards webchat in customer queries to its retailer partners, including ASOS, AO and Missguided, during Black Friday week.

Gnatta says it processes more than two million conversations a month across its platform, which pulls together various channels a company uses to communicate with customers – including email SMS, social media, webchat, telephone, review sites or email.

Increasing numbers of these interactions happened across webchat (38%), a shift from last year when social media accounted for nearly 50% of all queries and webchat for 26%, says Gnatta. Social media accounted for 37% of queries this year. This points to a shift towards faster resolution, as customers increasingly expect to receive an immediate response.

Initial estimates indicate that this year’s Black Friday was set to beat all records, with IMRG predicting that sales would be up 9% on 2016.

Gnatta’s figures indicate that final sales tallies will be even higher as customer interactions have increased by 47% over last year.

Jack Barmby, founder and CEO of Gnatta said: “The way customers communicate with retailers is changing. People expect an instant response on any channel. They want a retailer to know about previous conversations they’ve had, and to be able to connect the dots across channels. A good retailer will be able to deliver that. Great customer experience differentiates a brand. If you’re going to sell more products, you need to be able to handle more customer queries, too. And you need to be ready to deal with customers seamlessly across multiple channel – phone, social media, messenger, webchat, email, the lot.”