With online purchases poised to exceed those in physical stores this holiday season, Black Friday 2017 could be the busiest day ever for cyberattacks on retailers, according to digital ID provider ThreatMetrix.

This week, the company released its Q3 2017 Cybercrime Report that describes the possible scale of attacks during the shopping season. A company press release said that intensified bot activity on the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network during the past quarter indicates that cybercriminals are using automated attacks, which will help scale cybercrime over the holidays.

Fraudsters are acting with haste to test credentials stolen in recent high-profile attacks, with an aim to perpetrate large-volume attacks on digital businesses. In the past 90 days alone the ThreatMetrix Digital Identity Network detected 171 million attacks, a 32 percent increase since the beginning of 2017.

According to the ThreatMetrix report, cybercriminals could launch in excess of 50 million attacks during the peak holiday shopping days around Black Friday — with the average ticket size of a fraudulent transaction double that of a good one, the company said.

"In the same way that retailers are bringing on supply staff to cover this busy shopping period, cybercriminals are creating armies of automated cyber robots  to carry out large-scale attacks on businesses," according to the release. "… [W]e can see that the scale of e-commerce attacks in the final quarter of 2017 is likely to surpass the entire attack number for all industries — including banking and media — from Q4 2016."