LP Industry Evolution & A Look Into The Future
 

Editor's Message: 

For Most It's a Career. For a Few It's a Profession.

A Professional looks back after 30+ years helping to guide the industry.

With a unique individual style, defined by a quiet strength, level balance, sincere leadership, and depth of knowledge respected by senior management, stores, and AP teams alike, this true professional took the time to share his thoughts and advice for the next generation as he gently closes the door.

Leaving his mark on dozens if not hundreds, with many following his footsteps and hopefully carrying his qualities forward.

Hear his advice that we're honored to share with all of you.

The LP industry has evolved dramatically over the last 40 years. And over the next 10 to 20, it'll evolve to a place we're only getting glimpses of now. While the digital revolution may increase the amount of information you'll be able to manage, it will all still boil down to managing people, data, processes, theft, crisis, and keeping stores safe.

Chad McIntosh, VP of LP & Risk Management for Bloomingdales, has spent the last 40 years developing teams, building programs, delivering shrink results, solving critical issues, and watching the industry evolve. As he now enters retirement, we ask him to look back and look forward in this career-spanning interview full of invaluable wisdom and insight.

 Episode Sponsored By:

Jim Palmer - U.S. Coast Guard Community Services Command - Quick Take 15

Now in his 15th year attending NRF Protect, Jim Palmer, CSO & Sr. Director, U.S. Coast Guard Community Services Command, tells Amber what he looks for in the conference each year when it comes to networking and finding new solutions. Also, learn about his unique reporting structure at the Coast Guard CSC.

Peter Chie, CFI named Vice President Asset Protection
for Bloomingdale's
Peter was previously the Director of Asset Protection for the retailer for over three years before taking this new role. He's held a variety of other asset protection positions including Regional Manager of Field Asset Protection for Advance Auto Parts, Senior Manager of Supply Chain Asset Protection for The Home Depot, Business Partner of Asset Protection for Target, Sr. Regional Manager of AP for Payless Shoe Source, Regional Manager of LP for L Brands, Flagship Manager of LP for Gap Inc./Old Navy and Corporate LP Manager for Tops Appliance City. Congratulations Peter!

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NCR Acquires StopLift, Gains Powerful Anti-Theft Solution for Self-Checkout

ATLANTA & CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) today announced that it has acquired StopLift Checkout Vision Systems, a leader in intelligent computer vision systems, to combat theft in the retail business. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

This transaction reinforces NCR's strategic focus on self-checkout solutions that provide the best possible shopper experience and return on the investment for retailers. NCR will integrate StopLift's Artificial Intelligence capabilities that detect unusual and possibly fraudulent behavior into its retail store transformation solutions. StopLift's loss prevention management features will help NCR address retailers' concerns over shrink. NCR is the global leader in self-checkout technology with more than 250,000 installations worldwide.

"This acquisition will help NCR accelerate growth in our market-leading self-checkout and store transformation solutions," said NCR President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael D. Hayford. "In addition to creating new value for our retail customers around the world, StopLift's fraud detection technology will be a key enabler of our frictionless commerce product strategy."

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., StopLift has developed Artificial Intelligence capabilities that visually determine what occurs during each transaction to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent behavior at the checkout. Most notably, StopLift's technology detects scan-avoidance and flags unscanned, unpaid merchandise at the checkout. Examples include passing items around the scanner, leaving unscanned items in the shopping cart, and covering up the barcode while scanning.

"We have been working with NCR since 2016 to integrate our patented technology with SmartAssist, which successfully detects shrink at the checkout counter with NCR's self-checkout solutions," explained Malay Kundu, founder and CEO of StopLift. "As retailers are looking to embrace frictionless checkout, our combined technologies will bring the advantages of loss prevention management to NCR's global customer base in this critical time of retail transformation."

The two companies anticipate a smooth transition for customers, channel partners and employees.

"The Americans now have the information disadvantage."
Crazy Work Hours and Lots of Cameras: Silicon Valley Goes to China
One Chinese technology executive said he worked 14 to 15 hours a day at least six days a week. Another said he worked every waking hour and forced himself to watch movies to relax.

Work habits weren't the only sharp difference between the Valley and China. By the end of the week, a group of American executives and investors found an alternate tech universe. It resembles Silicon Valley superficially. Look closer, and it becomes a futuristic yet closed-off world that can be equally impressive, alienating and dystopian.

Chinese technology executives, they found, were even more driven and more willing to do whatever it takes to win. But that comes with major trade-offs, and punishing work schedules are only the beginning. They found Chinese tech executives to be less reflective about the social impact and potential misuse of their technologies, a potentially worrisome quality in a country with loosely enforced privacy laws, strict government censorship and a powerful domestic surveillance apparatus.

"It was impressive to see the pace of innovation in China," said Mark Goldberg, a partner at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm. "Some of the newer technologies, like facial recognition software, can be very powerful, and will need to be deployed thoughtfully - not just in China, but also in the West."

The Silicon Valley delegation did not expect facial recognition technology to be so widespread in Chinese life. Companies they visited used it at office entrances and at retail kiosks inside their facilities. They also saw demo videos of how the Chinese police could use the technology to monitor potential crimes in crowded public spaces and learn how many suspects had been arrested.

After grasping how prevalent the cameras were, they started counting them. Even the van they rented from the hotel in Shenzhen had a handful of cameras installed, blinking from time to time to signal that they were on.

Then, like many people in China, they got used to it, as if the cameras weren't even there. nytimes.com

After the Breach: Tracing the 'Smoking Gun'
Systems, technology, and threats change, and your response plan should, too. Here are three steps to turn your post-breach assessment into a set of workable best practices.

Step 1: Identify Potential Sources of Data
Following an incident, the simple question of "who did what?" is one of the most critical - yet most difficult - to answer. When an incident occurs, organizations want to discover the root cause as soon as possible to determine if other data is actively at risk and avoid additional compromise.

A full examination of security, operations, and access logs can help determine the initial cause and piece together a sequence of events.

Biometric and session data - such as mouse movement, logins, previously issued commands, viewed windows, and keystrokes during a session - provide tamper-proof audit trails that allow an analyst to replay or rebuild a user's action. When supplemented with log data, this type of monitoring gives analysts the tools to building a timeline of events, which is invaluable for both real-time and post-breach investigations.

Step 2: Acquire, Verify & Extract Breach Data
After identifying potential data sources, the analyst will need to acquire the data from the identified sources and - perhaps most importantly - verify its integrity before analyzing it.

After the data has been acquired, it's essential to verify its legitimacy, to prove that the data has not been tampered with, especially if it's needed as legal evidence in building an incident response plan.

Advanced forensic tools can protect against tampering by providing encrypted, time-stamped and digitally signed data. In addition, they can secure sensitive information with granular access policies.

After the data has been collected and verified, analysts will need to examine the data by assessing and extracting the relevant pieces of information. The use of forensics tools can provide quick navigation to the point in time where the suspicious event occurred. Combining log data with session metadata can accelerate examination of privileged account-related incidents.

Step 3: Conduct a Full Analysis
Once the relevant information has been extracted, the team should analyze the data to draw conclusions that help answer the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a breach. The foundation of good forensics is using a methodical approach to reach appropriate conclusions based on the available data or determine that no other conclusion can be drawn.

Third-party services can assist with conducting assessments ranging from information technology risk and network vulnerability assessments to penetration testing and many other types of assessments that determine if there is a weakness that can be targeted and eradicated. These risk evaluations allow an organization to establish an appropriate protocol and response process to protect it from future incidents.

By conducting a thorough post-breach assessment, a company can craft a thoughtful response plan that prioritizes mitigation of risk, security of critical assets, and effective crisis execution.

Security teams should conduct an audit at least once a year and conduct incident response plan "fire drills" to ensure the plan is still relevant, minimizes the possibility of future recurrences, and can be fine-tuned to establish accountability on an ongoing basis. darkreading.com

HHS Tries Again: New Cyber Coordination Center Launched
After an initial effort got off to a rocky start, the Department of Health and Human Services has started over, making a second attempt at launching a cyber coordination center that aims to help the healthcare sector improve its defenses and boost information sharing. But will the latest effort prove successful?

The Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center, or HC3, replaces HHS's Healthcare Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, which was launched in 2017 but proved to be controversial. The creation of that previous HHS cyber center confused and surprised some members of Congress. And it was stained by management and staff turmoil.

"There are organizations that still think sharing any information with HHS can cause a regulatory action to occur. ... I hope with the launch of the HC3 we will continue to make progress." - Erik Decker, University of Chicago Medicine. govinfosecurity.com

7-Eleven Debuts Scan & Pay Using Shoppers' Smartphones In 14 Stores

Kroger advances plan to partner with Ocado on e-grocery DCs

App glitch, low inventory puts a damper on Starbucks' holiday promotion launch

The Quickest Way to Access Bookmarks

In Firefox or Google Chrome, you can quickly access your bookmarks by typing what you're looking for right in the search box. For example, if you have the D&D Daily saved in the bookmarks, just start typing that in the search box and voilà - the result pops right up. This is a neat time saver.

Who's In Your Online Shopping Cart?
Crooks who hack online merchants to steal payment card data are constantly coming up with crafty ways to hide their malicious code on Web sites. In Internet ages past, this often meant obfuscating it as giant blobs of gibberish text that was obvious even to the untrained eye. These days, a compromised e-commerce site is more likely to be seeded with a tiny snippet of code that invokes a hostile domain which appears harmless or that is virtually indistinguishable from the hacked site's own domain.

Publicwww.com is a handy online service that lets you search the Web for sites running snippets of specific code. Searching publicwww.com for sites pulling code from bootstrap-js-dot-com currently reveals more than 50 e-commerce sites seeded with this malicious script. A search at publicwww for the malcode hosted at js-react-dot-com indicates the presence of this code on at least a dozen online merchants.

Sometimes, antivirus products will detect the presence of these malicious scripts and block users from visiting compromised sites, but for better or worse none of the sites I mentioned here currently are flagged as malicious by any of the more than five dozen antivirus tools at the file-scanning service virustotal.com. krebsonsecurity.com

3 pressing retention challenges facing today's online marketplaces
Marketplaces are expected to account for an astounding 40 percent of the global online retail market by 2020-and that's not just mega-names like Amazon, Rakuten and Alibaba.

But despite the astounding growth of disruptive marketplaces in recent years, these businesses still face very traditional challenges when it comes to retention. In fact, the challenges of marketplaces are compounded by the fact that their retention efforts must be split between two worlds: buyers and sellers.

To remain healthy and continue to grow into the future, today's marketplaces must address the following three fundamental challenges when it comes to their ability to retain buyers and sellers on their platforms.

Identifying People Most Likely to Churn
Establishing Effective Onboarding
Understanding Marketplace Health digitalcommerce360.com

2018 Online Apparel Report
Who's winning and losing among the 266 leading online retailers of apparel and accessories, the rise of Amazon, and how stores and brands are responding to the digital challenge

E-commerce accounted for 27.4% of retail purchases of clothing and accessories in 2017, up from 23.5% in 2016. As more apparel and department stores close or downsize, more and more sales move online. The digital disruption of apparel retailing is just beginning.

That's why it's vital to have the data that shows how consumer behavior is changing and how retailers and brands are responding. That's what you'll find in The 2018 Online Apparel Retail Report from Internet Retailer. (Must pay to get report.) digitalcommerce360.com

Deloitte: Holiday shoppers hooked on these two shipping preferences
 

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Featured Job Spotlights

	SOC Director Scottsdale, AZ ADT Cyber Security is searching for a Senior level security practioner/manager with extensive experience in providing a multi-tenant or Enterprise equivalent customer focused 24x7x365 Managed Security Service. This opportunity encompasses the day-to-day operation of the Security Operation Center and will have primary responsibility for customer satisfaction driven by the service provided through the SOC...
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NEW TODAY	Regional Asset Protection & Safety Manager Dallas, TX The Regional Asset Protection and Safety Manager will lead the Region in shrink reduction and profit maximization efforts. The position will proactively seek to bring economic value to the company, promoting profitable sales and world class customer service while ensuring a safe place to work and shop...
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Tips for New Leaders: Avoid These Mistakes, Four Things To Do
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