A cyber crime occurs every 18 seconds, but few companies are developing proactive plans to deal with a security event before it happens. Involving executives, including a company's board of directors, is imperative for retailers to mitigate the damage from a breach.

Retailers estimate that they will lose $3.8bn to return fraud for the 2014 holiday season, up from last year's $3.4bn estimate, according to a recent National Retail Federation (NRF) survey. Retailers also estimated that 5.5 percent of all holiday returns are fraudulent, similar to last year's 5.8 percent.

It's been a year since Target's data breach and retailers are still vulnerable even as the busiest shopping season kicks into high gear, warn security experts, largely due to a lack of focus on asset management.

Shoppost, a platform for social commerce, is now available for retailers selling on the Amazon Webstore. Created by Zantler, Shoppost allows retailers to sell their products in-stream on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blogs in a post that looks like an e-commerce storefront and will connect customers directly to the checkout process.

A majority of U.S. shoppers, 60 percent, said they would be comfortable giving out personal information, anonymously, to their favorite stores in exchange for benefits and rewards. Another 56 percent would give out the same information to a product brand and 46 percent to a product app, according to a recent survey from Wearables.com and The Center for Generational Kinetics.

After the massive data breaches that have plagued retailers from Target to Home Depot in recent years, a new study shows that retail is the most compromised industry in terms of data security.

Big data is a big buzzword in retail and while the term can be ambiguous, 92 percent of executives say they're satisfied with the results of big data applications within their organizations.