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With the holiday season fast approaching, it’s important to be aware that phishing and remote access attacks are likely to increase. Companies need to be vigilant and make sure their cyber security protocols are up-to-date. In this blog post, we will discuss why the bad guys are more active around the holidays and how businesses can protect themselves against these malicious attacks.

Why is phishing more prevalent around the holidays?

During the holiday season, people tend to be more relaxed in their online activities. They may open emails from unknown senders without thinking twice about it or click on links in emails that they would normally ignore. This is exactly what phishers want — a chance for them to access your company’s confidential data by exploiting that momentary lapse in vigilance.

To minimize the risk of a successful attack, businesses need to take steps to ensure their employees are vigilant during this period and refrain from clicking on suspicious links or providing personal information. The best way to do this is through regular training and education programs. This can come in a simple form of a reminder email. With the chaos of Christmas, we can tend to forget that the bad guys don’t wind down.

For them, it’s a given that their targets will be less staffed and feelings of both joy and stress will fill the air. Those working extra hard to meet those last minute deadlines, will be more prone to Phishing due to their focus. High spirited members, may be more inclined to respond or help as “tis the season”. This could come in the form of replying to a spear phish campaign or social engineering attack.

Did you leave the backdoor open?

The bad guys will know that monitoring operations may be lax due to less staff. They may be able to go under the radar as not all companies can afford a 24x7 security operations center.

Your IT and security team also have families to visit, and should be able to wind down, enjoying the holidays. With this though comes risk so making sure there is a team effort on monitoring for threats. This may be just keeping up with the news on LinkedIn, Twitter or others platforms.

We’ve already had multiple criticals released for Fortinet SSL VPN, Citrix ADC and they won’t be the last. Ensuring that there is an understanding of your patching process is critical. Your team needed flexibility to patch criticals during the Christmas period.

The holiday season is a peak time for cyber attacks due to people’s increased vulnerability at this time of year. Companies need to make sure they are taking all necessary steps to protect themselves from any potential threats by educating their employees about cyber security protocols, investing in appropriate software solutions, regularly updating passwords, enabling two-factor authentication wherever applicable, and monitoring systems for suspicious activities on a regular basis. Doing so will help ensure that your business remains safe from cyber criminals during this festive period and beyond!

If you need to keep up with emerging threats, why not visit my threat feed, or follow on Twitter.

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