December downtime is uptime for cybercrime

When companies start to slow down for the holidays, cybercriminals grab the opportunity to ramp up their attacks. Ransomware spikes during the holiday season. In November and December 2021, attempted ransomware attacks grew by 70%[i]. As emails with Black Friday deals and seasonal promo offers flood inboxes, phishing attacks will boom too. A 2021 report showed an increase of 150% in phishing attacks during the festive season last year[ii].

With the holidays on the horizon, here’s what you should know about keeping your network and information safe from cybercriminals on the hunt for easy game.

Cybercriminals love the holiday lull

Here’s why.

Networks and company systems are typically watched with less scrutiny by skeleton crews—and that makes them easy targets for hackers’ spam, phishing, ransomware, and malware schemes.

Employees are distracted or in a rush to finish tasks as the business prepares to shut down, so they may let their guard down, miss signs of a cyberattack, practice poor cyber safety, or get duped through social engineering.

Securing an IT environment is extremely complex, and it’s not something that is stagnant either. When updates aren’t performed regularly, it creates vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can easily exploit. As threats and threat actors are constantly evolving, vulnerabilities are always shifting.

One study revealed that 84% of companies have high-risk vulnerabilities on their external networks but that half of these could be removed simply by installing updates[iii].

You could be vulnerable

Do you know where the gaps in your security are?

A lot of businesses have no idea where or how they are vulnerable. Knowing where gaps and vulnerabilities lie is the only way of ensuring that cybersecurity is beefed up adequately to address them. Patchwork efforts to close security gaps reactively are hardly ever effective, and they make for a poor overall security posture.

Making up your company’s security posture are all the measures you have in place to prevent a breach. If you don’t have good control of your security posture or know if your security mechanisms are working properly, your network and data are at risk.

With your business’s security posture directly linked to the possibilities of attack, you should know the cold hard truth about your company’s cybersecurity health ahead of the festive season. An email security scan is just not going to cut it, especially if the software is not updated or if there are loopholes elsewhere.

Wrong tools create loopholes

Are your tools offering any protection?

Companies often apply what they can afford to the areas of the infrastructure they believe to be most important, but this approach is costly and not always effective, especially when solutions are badly configured, left unmonitored or out of date.

The cost of protecting systems and data against cyber threats can rocket when investments in security technologies aren’t planned and don’t consider the company’s specific risks. At the heart of keeping company networks safe and security costs as low as possible is choosing the right tools for the job, configuring them properly, and monitoring them.

You should know what to protect

Are you protecting what’s important?

It’s impossible to protect what you don’t know needs protecting. A vulnerability audit is the starting point if you have no view of your company’s security posture. Vulnerability assessments reveal how organisations’ people, networks, endpoints, and web applications could give attackers unintentional access to confidential company data based on how they have been designed and managed.

Performing regular network vulnerability assessments is the best way to mitigate cyber risks, identify network issues, and fix vulnerable areas before any malicious unauthorised actions can happen. For most businesses, a vulnerability audit is an eye-opener, especially for those that believe they’ve got their cybersecurity sorted.

There’s still time to correct your posture

Are you ready for an eye-opener?

Don’t be scared to discover the loopholes in your organisation’s security architecture and cybersecurity awareness weak points. Know where you stand so that you know where to begin to protect systems, employees, and customers.

Get ahead of cyber criminals this festive season by getting cyber health checks done on your systems. This will help you to understand where the vulnerabilities are and guide you in choosing the right technologies and tools to close security gaps.

Get cyber-safe before the holidays start

AVeS Cyber Security is offering affordable Black Friday packages to help companies get equipped for a cyber-safe festive season. Secure your networks and rest assured knowing that the A-Team has your back. Have a look at the packages to get started here

References

[i] https://darktrace.com/newsroom/darktrace-reports-30-more-ransomware-attacks-targeting-organizations-during-the-holiday-period-e

[ii] https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/phishing-holiday-season-attacks-on-the-rise

[iii] https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/vulnerabilities-corporate-networks-2020/