Think your WAF has you covered? Think again. This holiday season, unmonitored JavaScript is a critical oversight allowing attackers to steal payment data while your WAF and intrusion detection systems see nothing. With the 2025 shopping season weeks away, visibility gaps must close now.
Get the complete Holiday Season Security Playbook here.
Bottom Line Up Front
The 2024 holiday season saw major attacks on website code: the Polyfill.io breach hit 500,000+ websites, and September’s Cisco Magecart attack targeted holiday shoppers. These attacks exploited third-party code and online store weaknesses during peak shopping, when attacks jumped 690%.
For 2025: What security steps and monitoring should online retailers take now to prevent similar attacks while still using the third-party tools they need?
As holiday shopping traffic increases, companies strengthen their servers and networks, but a critical weak spot remains unwatched: the browser environment where malicious code runs hidden on users’ devices, stealing data and bypassing standard security.
The Client-Side Security Gap
Recent industry research reveals the concerning scope of this security gap:
These statistics underscore a fundamental shift in the threat landscape. As organizations have strengthened server-side defenses through WAFs, intrusion detection systems, and endpoint protection, attackers have adapted by targeting the browser environment where traditional monitoring tools fall short due to the following:
- Limited Visibility: Server-side monitoring tools cannot observe JavaScript execution within users’ browsers. WAFs and network monitoring solutions miss attacks that operate entirely in the client environment.
- Encrypted Traffic: Modern web traffic is encrypted via HTTPS, making it difficult for network monitoring tools to inspect the content of data transmissions to third-party domains.
- Dynamic Nature: Client-side code can modify its behavior based on user actions, time of day, or other factors, making static analysis insufficient.
- Compliance Gaps: Although regulations like PCI DSS 4.0.1 focus now more on client side risk, there’s still limited guidance on client-side data protection.
Understanding Client-Side Attack Vectors
E-skimming (Magecart)
Perhaps the most notorious client-side threat, Magecart attacks involve injecting malicious JavaScript into e-commerce sites to steal payment card data. The 2018 British Airways breach, which exposed 380,000 customers’ payment details, exemplifies how a single compromised script can bypass robust server security. The attack operated for two weeks undetected, harvesting data directly from the checkout form before transmitting it to attacker-controlled servers.
Supply Chain Compromises
Modern web applications depend heavily on third-party services, analytics platforms, payment processors, chat widgets, and advertising networks. Each represents a potential entry point. The 2019 Ticketmaster breach occurred when attackers compromised a…
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