Ho-Ho-Holiday Hackers: Securing Your Organization’s Information During the Holidays

The tree is up, stockings hung, and lights have begun twinkling in anticipation of another holiday season. What’s that feverish tapping you hear? Reindeer on the roof? More likely, it’s sound of fingers on keyboards as your employees squeeze some last-minute preholiday work from home or hit the cyber-mall in search of online bargains. It’s music to the ears of a particular breed of seasonal Grinches — the holiday hackers.

Hackers love the holidays, and for good reason. As more shoppers go online to do their gift buying, our collective wallets are open, credit cards out, and defenses down. Ecommerce experts forecast that online spending during the 2019 holiday shopping season will rise 13.2 percent over the previous year to $135 billion in the U.S. alone, while in-store footfall is expected to drop by 7.5 percent. A growing number of those online purchases are happening on mobile devices. In fact, 2018 marked the first year in which the majority of holiday online sales were over smartphones, thanks in large part to retail apps.

Online retail traffic is not the only factor driving up cybersecurity risk during the holiday season for enterprises. With many employees hoping to spend more time with their families during the holidays, staff often choose to work from home during the break, frequently connecting remotely with their employer. According to TechRepublic, 24 percent of users will use unsecure public WiFi to complete their work while another 28 percent will send work documents to personal email accounts. On top of this, 15 percent of office staff working remotely during the holidays will connect data cards and USB drivers to their work computers, opening the door to malware and inadvertent data exfiltration.

The combination of increased online commerce (sometimes in the workplace), the proliferation of mobile endpoints (such as smartphones and tablets), and more remote work being done from less-secure environments creates a perfect holiday storm of vulnerabilities — one that hackers are eager to exploit. Businesses, particularly retailers, see a surge in online traffic. Everything from ecommerce sites to point of sale (POS) devices can provide cybercriminals with access to a business’s network. A hacker only needs to find a weakness in one of these systems to gain entry and launch an attack.

Phishing is a threat any time of year, but cybercriminals step up their efforts around the holidays. The majority of cyberattacks begin with a phishing scheme, and emails touting holiday shopping bargains are the biggest culprits. Staff need to be wary of links in such emails, as well as suspicious text messages and social media offers. Likewise, ransomware attacks are not limited to the holiday season, but cybercriminals know that many enterprise networks and systems are often less assiduously monitored over the holidays when key staff are away. Malicious actors can have days or weeks to lock or hijack systems and steal user data before anyone notices.

The following tips can help keep the holiday hacking Grinches at bay:

1. Give your staff the gift of knowledge: The holiday season is the perfect time for annual refresher training on cybersecurity best practices. Provide employees with concrete, up-to-date information on the latest cyber threats and how to avoid them.
2. Set clear security policies for the holidays: Particularly when it comes to working remotely from home and other outside locations, employees should try to limit using public networks and especially avoid transferring sensitive information over them.
3. Make a list and check it twice: Ensure systems and software are up-to-date and properly patched. Before staff go home for the holidays, make sure key backups are working and isolated from your primary network — either offsite or in the cloud. Businesses, particularly retailers, should consider segmenting their networks to prevent access from endpoints like POS devices.
4. Review your company’s response and recovery plans: Security breaches can happen despite the best planning and preparation. How you respond to an attack can make the difference between a temporary inconvenience and a full-blown crisis.

One of the most effective defenses your business can employ when primary staff are away is an around-the-clock security information and event management (SIEM) system to log activity in your absence and a security operations center (SOC) to monitor and respond to critical events. Valeo Networks provides a USA-based SIEM/SOC team, offering 24x7x365 detection and response to give you peace of mind that your businesses information assets are safe and out of reach from holiday hackers this season.