Stores, cybersecurity experts prepare for busy online weekend from shoppers, hackers

MOUNT VERNON, Iowa (KCRG) - Thanksgiving hasn’t even arrived yet, but the holiday rush has already started at One Mission.

“We are just constantly busy those days, making and shipping products,” co-founder John Rhomberg said Tuesday.

The Mount Vernon shop specializes in custom items, like mugs and t-shirts, and it donates 40% of every purchase to charity, making its products popular gifts.

“About a third of our overall annual sales come in about a 20-day period from the very end of November through the first part of December,” Rhomberg said.

On Tuesday, he and his wife, Amanda, spent the day taking orders, printing shirts, packing boxes to be shipped, and helping customers at their 1st Street SE store.

However, most of One Mission’s customers may never step foot inside: Rhomberg estimates about 95% of their business is from online sales.

“It’s a very, very busy time that we spend months preparing for,” he said.

The National Retail Federation estimates more than 165 million people will shop over the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, many of them online.

While the holiday season is busy for shoppers and stores, it’s also busy for crooks.

“The hackers get very busy because they know how much money is being moved around,” Aaron Warner, CEO of Procircular, a Coralville information security and privacy firm, said.

Warner said that as hackers become savvier in their methods, so too do the websites they’re trying to hack. However, he said online shoppers should still be cautious when making purchases. Warner recommended people use websites like privacy.com to keep their information safe.

“It’s a website that you can go to that allows you to create a virtual credit card that’s useful only on specific sites or only for a specific period of time,” Warner said. “Once you’ve used it, or once it expires, it evaporates, and no one can use it again.”

Warner said a deal that sounds too good to be true probably is and may instead be someone trying to steal your information.

“As long as they stay to the mainstay websites or companies that they know are local, they’re usually pretty safe,” Warner said. “It’s when you get into places where you go chasing a deal or looking for kind of an obscure website overseas to find something, that you can end up wandering down some pretty dark hallways. That’s when your computer gets infected. That’s when your computer can be used against you.”

One Mission said it takes every precaution it can to ensure the safety and security of its website.

“If that’s a big concern for you, just come to the shop, and we’ll take care of you here,” Rhomberg said.

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