Huskeys Launches Free Holiday Season Readiness Checklist as AI-Powered Attacks Target Retail Traffic

The busiest shopping weeks of the year are also among the most demanding for retail security teams. With US online holiday spending expected to top $275 billion, attackers are using AI to scale their operations and hide malicious activity inside surging traffic.

Network Edge Security Management (NESM) company Huskeys is responding with a free 2026 Holiday Season Readiness Checklist, built to help security and digital teams identify vulnerabilities, strengthen edge protection, and prepare their applications and infrastructure for increasingly sophisticated attacks before the holiday peak arrives.

Adobe forecasts that US online holiday spending will reach $275.1 billion between November and December 2026, with $47.5 billion of that expected during Cyber Week alone.

Automated traffic now makes up a significant share of the online ecosystem as well. Imperva's 2026 Bad Bot Report found that more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025 was automated.

This holiday season, attackers are doing more than exploiting higher volumes. They are using AI to make attacks more sophisticated, more scalable, and harder to separate from legitimate activity.

Traditional security infrastructure, including edge services such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), CDNs, and bot management tools, often runs across separate platforms, policies, and teams. During peak shopping periods, that fragmentation creates security gaps and conflicting decisions.

The result cuts both ways. Legitimate shoppers and AI-powered shopping agents can be mistakenly blocked, while sophisticated malicious bots and automated attacks blend into the increased traffic.

AI shopping agents add another layer of complexity. Consumers increasingly rely on automated agents to discover products, compare prices, and complete purchases. Retailers now have to distinguish between legitimate automated activity and malicious agents attempting to exploit their applications.

“The holiday season puts enormous pressure on retail security teams, but protecting the business shouldn't come at the expense of the customer experience. As AI-driven traffic reshapes how consumers discover and purchase products, while attackers increasingly leverage AI to become more sophisticated, organizations need to rethink how they distinguish legitimate activity from malicious behavior. Security must become more precise, adaptive, and coordinated across the network edge. We created this checklist to help security teams identify gaps, prepare for emerging threats, and enter the busiest period of the year with greater confidence,” said Itai Gafni, CEO and Co-Founder of Huskeys.

The Holiday Season Readiness Checklist gives retail and e-commerce security teams 20 practical checks to assess their readiness ahead of the holiday peak. The checks are organized across six critical areas:

• Close network edge coverage gaps: Build a complete inventory of WAF, CDN, bot, and firewall rules, find unprotected applications and APIs, and resolve conflicting security policies.
• Prepare for new vulnerabilities: Identify exposed endpoints, deploy virtual patches across edge providers, and test emergency rules against live traffic before activating them.
• Protect checkout, login, and payment: Review the rules that affect critical customer journeys, identify false positives, and strengthen defenses against credential stuffing and card testing.
• Distinguish legitimate AI agents from malicious bots: Understand which agents are accessing applications and set policies based on their identity, behavior, and purpose.
• Prepare for peak traffic volumes: Reassess rate limits, simulate peak traffic, and put controls in place for high-demand products and limited inventory.
• Align teams and response procedures: Define ownership of security alerts, establish escalation processes, and pre-approve emergency rule changes before the holiday freeze.

The holiday season highlights a broader challenge in application security. Protecting the business takes more than preventing attacks. Security teams also have to make sure the controls protecting their applications do not disrupt the customers, transactions, and digital experiences that drive revenue.

Huskeys helps organizations manage and optimize their existing network edge security infrastructure through a unified control layer across WAFs, CDNs, and edge services. By bringing visibility, policy management, and automation together, the platform enables security teams to identify gaps, reduce false positives, and apply more precise security policies across their environments.

The results show up where revenue is most exposed. In deployments across booking and commerce environments, Huskeys customers have reduced false positives on booking and checkout flows by more than 80%, while strengthening protection against malicious traffic.

Security teams have limited time to review their configurations, address weaknesses, and get ready for traffic patterns that look very different from an ordinary business day.

The 2026 Holiday Season Readiness Checklist is available as a free download for retail and e-commerce security teams.