Constant Cyber Attack for Retail.
Know your retail attack surface better than the people targeting it.
Your business changes at pace. New technology programs, new channels, new suppliers.
That change is what keeps you competitive. It’s also what keeps attackers interested.The only question is whether your security moves as fast as your business does.
CAPABILITIES
CONTINUOUS OFFENSIVE SECURITY TESTING FOR RETAIL ENVIRONMENTS.
CovertSwarm delivers Continuous Offensive Security Testing capabilities across digital, social and physical attack vectors. No fixed scopes. Built to emulate how real attackers operate.
Web application security
Checkout flows, customer accounts, APIs, and the cloud infrastructure behind them, tested continuously.
Social Engineering
Phishing, vishing, and pretexting against the service desks and seasonal staff that account for most initial access in retail.
Physical Cyber Attack
Store access, device attacks, and insider-threat simulation, the entry points your technical controls can’t see.
OT, IoT and IIot
POS, payment terminals, kiosks, CCTV, and back-office systems across hundreds of distributed sites.
AI Red Teaming
Agentic reconnaissance, enumeration, surface mapping, and the groundwork at speed and scale.
Purple Teaming
Working alongside your defenders to turn every finding into a hardening they keep.
Stories from the Swarm.
The one where a fake email proved the risk was real
A fake onboarding email opened a real security gap, showing how even mature defences fail when assumptions go untested.
The one where we pulled off the holiday hangover heist
When employees return from holiday, help desks expect password reset requests. We exploited this expectation in a real social engineering…
RETAIL IS A NAMED, VALIDATED TARGET.
Retailers hold payment data, customer records, loyalty profiles, and supplier access. Everything an attacker wants.
The question isn’t whether you’re a target. It’s whether your assurance fits the business you’re running today, not the one you tested last year.
0 %
year-on-year increase in cyber incidents targeting UK retailers
0 %
of breaches now involve a third party. Doubled year-on-year.
0 %
of confirmed breaches involved ransomware
Why traditional testing leaves retail exposed.
Point-in-time testing isn’t built for the way retail works.
Successful businesses like yours are constant targets for attackers. Those who take offensive cybersecurity seriously don’t test their defenses once a year.
A penetration test is a photograph. Your estate is a film.
A traditional penetration test or red team engagement certifies a moment, but that moment is gone the day the report lands.
Between test windows you onboard staff, launch campaigns, migrate platforms, and add suppliers: essential changes that keep you competitive, but also windows attackers wait for. That’s the core problem.
Annual, fixed-scope testing assumes the environment holds still between tests.
Retail never holds still. So the test passes, the report files, and the gaps that opened the week after go unseen until someone else finds them.
AI and automated testing tools aren’t the solution.
They make automated scanning faster, but they do the same thing faster: catalog weaknesses in your digital systems. They don’t call your helpdesk, walk into a store, or prove that a chain of small gaps adds up to a real breach.
Real attackers work with context.
They learn your business over months. They watch a supplier relationship, map who works which shift, clock when a new store opens, and wait for the change window that gives them a way in. No point-in-time test and no automated tool replicates that. Matching a real attacker takes people who think like one, work with full context, and never stop at a single window.
Know your exposure. Before someone else does.
Talk to our team about how continuous offensive security testing maps to your retail environment, from stores and checkout to suppliers and everything in between.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different to a pen test?
A pentest is a snapshot on a fixed scope. Constant Cyber Attack is a permanent adversary with no scope limit. Real attackers don’t pause between engagements. Neither do we.
How is this different to a bug bounty?
A bug bounty is a marketplace of opportunistic findings. The Swarm is a coordinated team with strategic intent, chaining weaknesses the way a real adversary does.
Can AI testing tools do this?
AI tools make automated attack faster, and we use them too. They’re just tools. They act on the targets they’re pointed at, stay in the digital domain, and produce a list of findings, not a proven breach. They can’t call your helpdesk, walk into a store, or build the cross-vector chain a real attacker uses. We do, with AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement.
How do you run something constant without runaway costs?
It’s a subscription, not an open meter. You get continuous coverage on a predictable commercial model, scoped to your estate.
What does the evidence look like?
Findings arrive with the methodology and proof boards, insurers, and regulators expect, mapped to the outcomes they care about, not a generic CVSS dump.
Will this disrupt trading?
We operate with the restraint a live retail estate requires. The goal is to find what breaks before an attacker does, without breaking your operations to do it.
WHERE RETAIL GETS ATTACKED
Identity and help desk
Large, distributed workforces across stores, warehouses, contact centres, and seasonal staff make MFA bypass and helpdesk manipulation the highest-commonality entry point in retail.
Suppliers and third parties
Every integration is a potential entry point. Third-party involvement in breaches doubled to 30%, yet only 15% of businesses review supplier cyber risks.
Checkout and payment pages
Tag managers, analytics tools, personalization engines, consent platforms. Your checkout depends on dozens of third-party scripts. Each one is a potential injection point, and each change cycle creates new exposure.
Customer data and AI
Loyalty platforms, CRM, marketing automation, AI-assisted customer service. Connected to vast customer datasets, often with weak access controls and AI deployments that were never properly sanctioned.
Store estate and edge
POS, payment terminals, kiosks, Wi-Fi, CCTV, access control, and back-office systems across hundreds of sites. Distributed, always-on, and rarely treated as part of the security perimeter.
Physical and social
Seasonal workers without security training. High staff turnover. Service desks that answer the phone. Retail creates ideal conditions for social engineering and insider threat, and most retailers have never tested it.
Trading continuity, not security theater.
The real risk to retail isn’t just a technical vulnerability. It is what happens when one is exploited. Stores unable to transact. Customer data exposed.
An annual test cycle will not catch them in time. The gap between how often your business changes and how often it is tested is where that risk lives.
The compliance calendar is adding pressure.
Regulation is tightening across every market retailers operate in. Our assessments give you the evidence your board, insurers, and regulators expect.
LIVE
PCI DSS v4.0.1
Script governance and payment-page change detection now mandatory. Every checkout change cycle is a compliance event.
LIVE
Cyber Governance Code (UK)
Board-facing governance duty. Directors are now accountable for cyber resilience.
LIVE
Data Use & Access Act 2025 (UK)
Every compliance workflow change introduces new APIs, admin roles, and data exposure. Treat it as an attack surface event.
IN PROGRESS
Cyber Security & Resilience Bill (UK)
Would expand NIS-style regulation to MSPs and digital service providers — the supply chain retailers depend on for trading continuity.
“A supplier connection nobody had reviewed in over a year was all it took to reach our stock management system and data warehouse.”
Head of IT Security, UK