E-Commerce Cybersecurity Retrospective 2025: The Collapse of Certainties and the Specter of Vibecoding
Key Takeaways
- Major French retailers including Auchan, Boulanger and LDLC suffered massive data breaches in 2025
- AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities in 45% of cases, creating new security risks
- CNIL imposed record €325M fine on Google for deceptive advertising and forced cookies
Why It Matters
The French retail sector just experienced its cybersecurity equivalent of a natural disaster, with household names like Auchan and Boulanger hemorrhaging customer data faster than a leaky shopping cart. What makes this particularly alarming isn't just the scale of the breaches, but how they reveal the complete inadequacy of traditional security measures against modern threats. Infostealers are now bypassing multi-factor authentication by stealing browser session cookies, making yesterday's security gold standard about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Enter "vibecoding" – the practice of having AI generate code based on natural language prompts – which promises to democratize software development while potentially turning every marketing intern into an unwitting security liability. When 63% of these AI code generators are used by non-developers, and 45% of the resulting code contains vulnerabilities, we're essentially handing out loaded weapons to people who think SQL injection is a medical procedure. The prospect of Mark Zuckerberg's prediction that most code will be AI-generated by 2026 suddenly feels less like progress and more like a countdown to digital chaos.
The regulatory response has been swift and expensive, with CNIL wielding fines like a digital guillotine – Google's €325 million penalty serves as a stark reminder that compliance failures now carry price tags that would make a CFO weep. For e-commerce companies caught between increasingly sophisticated attackers and increasingly aggressive regulators, 2026 looks like a year where survival will depend on fundamentally rethinking security from the ground up. The age of hoping your firewall will save you is officially over – welcome to the era of assuming everything is already compromised.
