The holiday season is upon us and many are preparing to celebrate with family and friends. While this time of the year is all about fun and festive activities, it’s also a time when cybercriminals are most active. A recent industry study revealed that during the pandemic, 87% of UAE organisations experienced increased cyber threats, with 83% experiencing downtime due to a cyber incident during peak seasons such as holidays.
Increased online activities give cybercriminals plenty of opportunities to conduct data theft. Consumers also tend to drop their guards down and as people deal with the hustle and bustle of the festive season, cybersecurity becomes an afterthought.
Meanwhile, businesses often operate with a skeleton crew during this time of the year. This means that fewer staff members are looking out for cyber incidents, leaving networks unsupervised and data exposed. Additionally, with employees travelling, including security teams, they tend to be slower in responding to threats. Cybercriminals are well aware of these gaps and exploit this temporary weakness in security.
This being said, organisations should make a conscious decision to amplify their security measures during this season and embrace proactive measures to prevent attacks and better defend themselves.
Here are some tips to help businesses better prepare against cyber-attacks this holiday season:
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Conduct security awareness training programmes for staff
It may seem pedestrian but conducting security awareness training for employees is extremely valuable. Employees are typically among the primary targets of social engineering attacks such as phishing, business email compromise and fraud among others. Because of the holidays, cybersecurity may be the last thing on employees’ minds. Therefore, conducting a training session could help remind them of the threats that they should be cautious about and the steps that they should take to avoid falling victim to them.
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Keep your systems up to date
Businesses of all shapes and sizes use a variety of third-party applications. A successful attack often happens when a system or software isn’t kept up to date, which leave vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Cybercriminals take advantage of these weaknesses to gain access to the corporate network and wreak havoc. To prevent this, it is crucial for organisations to invest in a patch management system and ensure that all software and systems are updated to their latest versions.
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Have a plan
While taking precautionary measures can go a long way in preventing cyber-attacks, organisations need to be prepared should an attack becomes successful. It is important to have robust incident response (IR) and disaster recovery (DR) plans in place. An IR plan helps organisations effectively identify, eliminate and recover from a cybersecurity incident. Subsequently, a DR plan is focused on bringing systems back online and ensuring business continuity.
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Backup your data
At the core of all these preventative measures is ensuring that data is protected. It is paramount to conduct regular data backups to prevent losing this critical corporate resource.
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Embrace a zero trust approach
Employees will inevitably access corporate systems via insecure home or public networks. Since it’s the holiday season, some may access enterprise networks using brand new, unsanctioned devices. That’s why it is important to implement a comprehensive access management system to ensure secure access to corporate networks. Additionally, organisations should also adopt a zero trust approach, which assumes that all users are untrustworthy and requires strict identity verification for every user and device when attempting to access resources.
As the holidays approach, it is important to remember that cybercriminals do not take vacations. They are always ready to strike and take advantage of any vulnerabilities within an organisation. So, it is critical to be prepared against cyber threats and to remember that constant cyber vigilance is essential.
