St. Valentine’s Day is upon us! It’s a time when people are either trying to forge a new relationship with someone they fancy or spend time with someone they love. Writing for the Retail Times, Fiona Briggs suggests it’s an untapped retail opportunity, reporting that around 40 million people in 2024 celebrate it, leading to sales worth £2.1bn.
As for the United States, sales were expected to reach $26bn (£21.03bn) in the same year. So, it’s a big occasion in terms of being an opportunity to increase revenue, data capture and big data analysis for e-commerce providers such as Amazon, retailers and restaurants. While couples will be focused on candle-lit meals and romance, every consumer business needs to consider how invaluable customer data is to them, and how it can be used to increase sales. In some way, there is a form of romance going on in marketing. At least, proponents of AIDA might think so.
Nurturing data
Part of attracting customers to a brand falls down to how an organisation nurtures customers’ data – keeping it safe. They also want to connect with brands that use their data appropriately, in ways the customer trusts and to which they consent in order to also comply with data protection requirements. This includes those set out by GDPR in the EU and by the UK’s own version of it. However, hackers aren’t interested in romance or love; they see occasions like St. Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to cause havoc, launched scams and to reap in ill-gotten gains.
While they might prey on individuals, they may also do so on organisations – both large and small. In the fray is the use of artificial intelligence to make scams much more convincing. “Lovestruck, or scam-struck? Online daters say it’s tough to tell what’s real and what’s fake,” wrote Amy Bun for McAfee on 13th February 2024 in her article, ‘Love Bytes – How AI is shaping Modern Love.’
She adds: “AI has made the dating scene. In a big way. Nearly one in four Americans say they’ve spiced up their online dating photos and content with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Yet that might do more harm than good, as 64% of people also said that they wouldn’t trust a love interest who used AI-generated photos in their profiles.”
Types of scams
Google’s AI Overview says the scams often include fake online dating sites, fake shopping deals and phishing emails. Scammers may also use official photos, logos and sales promotions from legitimate companies to create fake websites, as well as steal personal information and credit card details. They may also promote fake online shopping deals, such as for flowers, chocolates, romantic meals or getaways; or even try to sell cheap counterfeit products at a high price.
Phishing emails or text messages are the most common method of exploiting people. They may pretend to be from a brand someone loves, or a person they adore, offering huge discounts or too-good-to-be true deals. Fake greetings cards, which could also be sent to someone working at a company, can also be sent to a corporate or personal email address.
Phishing is the risk of the loved up. It can occur in enterprises on St. Valentine’s Day, or on any other day, too. Equally, while most articles focus on attacks on individuals, the use of AI can make what’s being said or presented to a worker convincing. Sure, it doesn’t have anything to do with romance, but phishing is one of the common causes of ransomware attacks.
2024 ransomware cost
So, it should be taken as seriously, if not more so. For example, Varonis reports that Sophos has found that the average ransom in 2024 was $2.73m – up $1m from 2023. Statista also find that “The average downtime a company experiences after a ransomware attack is 24 days.” Nivedita James Palatty, writing for cyber-security firm Astra, says in a blog entitled, ‘100+ Ransomware Attack Statistics 2025: Trends & Cost’, ransomware is expected to cost its victims around $265 billion (USD) annually by 2031…and statistics predict a ransomware attack every two seconds.”
Data breaches or downtime can also occur to datacentres. In 2023, some of Oracle engineers’ St. Valentine’s celebrations were postponed after a NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) experienced an outage, reports The Register, in Boston in the US on 14th February 2023. The downtime lasted until the following day. In the interim, it took out phones, customer service, finance, shipping and receiving, as well as the shop floor of a military equipment manufacturer.
It also paralysed businesses that rely on NetSuite’s servers in Boston. The datacentre lost 30 minutes’ worth of data in the recovery process, and the cause of the event was an unspecified event that led the Oracle NetSuite team having to disconnect the power until it was resolved. While it’s not specified what caused the downtime, a data breach can have a similar if not more devastating impact – and that includes a ransomware attack.
Regulatory compliance
“It’s crucial to love your data because non-compliance to data protection regulations is damaging to customer and partner relationships, and it can attract some significant fines,” warns David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks. To prevent phishing, he recommends regular cyber-security training for staff, and ensuring data is backed up so that it can be recovered whenever it is necessary as a result of a manmade or natural disaster. He also suggests deploying WAN Acceleration, which can enable regular backups and restore data more rapidly than WAN optimisation or SD-WANs can do to permit operational activities to continue.
“While AI is being used by bad actors, it’s important to be prepared and to realise that phishing doesn’t just attack consumers, but it can impact enterprises as well, and can lead to data breaches,” explains Trossell, who advises organisations to create an air-gap for the most sensitive data.
There are times when you may want to have data close to you, but there are also moments when it’s important to keep it out of the reach of hackers. Loving your data, is not about an organisation’s own data, but also about its customers’ and partners’ data. By protecting and demonstrating that it takes cyber-security seriously, organisations can strengthen their relationships and businesses. ‘Romancing data’ is therefore about keeping it secure and safe wherever it is stored – caring for it just like anyone would care for a love-one or the one-to-be.
