Lucky Shoes Safeguards its Business With AlienVault

Lucky Shoes is a retailer with a long history. The company has been in business for almost 100 years, and started with one store. Lucky Shoes now operates four stores in its native Ohio, as well as selling its products at eight New Balance stores and two Stride Rite stores.

As Lucky Shoes grew, so did its online security threats. For a company with customers that are in search of “high-quality shoes,” Lucky Shoes needed a high-quality security management platform to manage threat detection and incident response across its various locations. Vicki Shepherd, Lucky Shoes’ CFO, worked with Brett Kimmell, principal security consultant of KCFS Cybersecurity and Lucky Shoes' IT consultant, to choose AlienVault USM Appliance for this job.

Prior to implementing AlienVault, Lucky Shoes only had a standard antivirus solution. Everything was done manually, and it was difficult for the retailer to maintain Payment Card Industry Security Standards (PCI) compliance. There was no correlation of log or network traffic, and trying to manage this task manually was impossible for a two-person IT team. As a result, IT lacked real-time insight into what was happening across corporate infrastructures, and threats were continuously being missed.

“I can’t think of more negative publicity than a credit card breach,” says Shepherd. “Those have been in the news quite a bit lately, and as a smaller retailer, we don’t have the reach of a Target or Home Depot. I think it would be quite devastating to us to have our reputation hurt in that way.”

Point-of-sale and credit card breaches where valuable customer data is stolen are exactly what hackers are after — and the biggest threats to retailers — according to Kimmell.

With AlienVault, Lucky Shoe now benefits from centralized logging, real-time analysis and network monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and other security essentials that helps it immediately detect and respond to threats.

“It’s amazing when you see the records of all the attempts to try to break into our network,” said Shepherd. “You feel so much more secure about avoiding viruses and things that can really shut you down.”

Kimmell adds, “I can look at the firewall and see different attempts in different ways — probably a dozen different countries on a regular basis.”

Lucky Shoes can shut these threats down in different ways, for example blocking an IP address if a firewall threat is observed.

Kimmell suggests that all retailers take their security a step further than just being PCI compliant.

“Even with basic PCI awareness training, in retail, people are so busy selling that security might not be top of mind. AlienVault is Lucky Shoes’ safeguard from insider threats — both malicious and accidental.”