5 Essential Holiday Cybersecurity Tips for Enterprises

While many businesses wind down during the holiday season, cyber criminals ramp up their efforts instead. E-commerce sites are obvious targets, but threat actors target cloud services providers, financial institutions, and social media networks just as often — if not more — during the holidays. Whatever your organization does, you’ll want to follow a few holiday cybersecurity tips to safeguard your sensitive data and protect your staff as the year comes to a close.

The good news is that if you’ve built a solid cybersecurity framework, you won’t need to radically change your approach for the holiday season. Some of the most common year-end threats are phishing and ransomware, which you can mitigate through staff training and software solutions. Zero trust principles can keep threat actors out of your network. Data breach contingency plans ensure that there’s still a chain of command, even if most of your staff is unavailable. By shoring up your organization’s cybersecurity during the holidays, you’ll set yourself up for success in the new year.

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Common holiday cyber threats

When watchdog organizations and government bodies issue warnings about holiday cyber threats, they’re usually referring to consumer scams. Fake e-commerce sites, bogus gift card requests, made-up missing packages, and phony charities are common sights in November and December. Your staff may be able to recognize and avoid these scams in their personal lives, but similar tricks that target professional organizations can be harder to spot.

Threat actors tend to be more aggressive during the holidays, but that’s only part of the reason why seasonal attacks may be more successful. Organizations themselves are often not operating at full capacity in November and December. Staff members take paid time off (PTO) or enjoy company-wide breaks. Holiday parties, visiting relatives, and last-minute shopping can be distracting both during and after work hours. Employees may simply relax their usual standards and lose focus as their minds turn to more festive activities.

Phishing is still an extremely common vector for professional attacks, and the holiday season is no exception. If a threat actor has access to a company directory, they may attempt to impersonate an organization’s CEO and pressure employees into giving up sensitive information. Even garden-variety scams, such as missing packages and charitable donations, may seem more plausible because organizations often do get more deliveries and donate more money before the end of the year.

In addition to extracting usernames and passwords, phishing can also be the first step in a cyber kill chain that leads to devastating ransomware installations. Compromised accounts may be hard to spot with a skeleton crew on IT duty. Data leakage — either malicious or accidental — is a real risk when staff members travel and need remote logins. 

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5 holiday cybersecurity tips to follow

Embrace zero trust principles

Zero trust principles are worthwhile all year round, but they become indispensable when a large chunk of your staff travels simultaneously. Operating under a “never trust, always verify” approach, zero trust systems assume that any account could be compromised, even if the username and password are correct. Given how easy it is to acquire credentials via social engineering and data breaches, this is often a fair assumption.

In a zero trust system, a user might have to prove their identity through multi-factor authentication (MFA), continuous logins, familiar devices, and recognized IP addresses. Otherwise, the system could restrict access to certain files or deny the login attempt entirely. While zero trust techniques can be mild inconveniences for legitimate workers, they’re often impossible hurdles for threat actors.

Use a security service edge (SSE) solution

When your full staff isn’t available, you’ll want as many layers as possible between a threat actor and your sensitive data. A security service edge (SSE) solution provides broad protection against a variety of cyber threats, from unauthorized logins on personal devices to malware installations on company-issued machines. Administrators can identify and isolate threats from a single, unified cybersecurity platform.

SSE platforms incorporate other data security technologies, including secure web gateways (SWGs), cloud access security brokers (CASBs), and zero trust network access (ZTNA) solutions. Together, these allow staff members to securely access cloud data from any location while giving administrators full visibility and control over what goes on in the network.

Train your staff

Of all the holiday cybersecurity tips described here, training your staff is arguably the most important. People, not computer systems, are the initial targets of phishing and similar scams. As such, your employees are your first line of defense against most cyber attacks. If they know how to recognize and avoid common social engineering schemes, they’re much less likely to give threat actors a foothold in your system.

Just before the holiday season gets underway, give your employees a refresher course on cybersecurity basics. Remind them that executive impersonation (a type of phishing also known as whaling), missing package, and charity scams may be especially prevalent this time of year. Also make sure that they have the appropriate security programs installed on both their company-issued and personal devices before they do any seasonal travel.

Lock down your data security

Traditional cybersecurity relies on a “perimeter defense” approach, which focuses on keeping out external threats. This strategy worked well in the era of office work and on-premises servers but falls short when mobile devices, cloud computing, and dark web credential databases come into play. If your organization has a data-centric security strategy, you’ll be able to monitor and protect your digital resources, even if you’re off-site and working with a limited staff.

Data loss prevention (DLP) solutions, for example, enable you to monitor your information across the web, private applications, email accounts, and cloud storage. You can view how employees access, modify, and share data in real time. If employees try to misuse data, a DLP platform can automatically notify an administrator or restrict access. These features allow your IT staff to travel or take time off for the holidays while still keeping a weather eye on your sensitive data.

Develop a data breach contingency plan

A data breach is a bad thing by definition, but the damage can range from trivial to catastrophic depending on how you respond. A contingency plan for a data breach should cover how to recognize a breach, how to respond in real time, how to communicate this information to stakeholders, and how to patch security holes after the fact. Having a plan in place can help mitigate attacks as they happen and recover more quickly when they’re over.

A contingency plan for the holidays requires a few extra steps, since the key players may not be available when you need them. Furthermore, you may have to direct your incident response from someone’s home rather than a central office. Create a chain of command with backup personnel available at every step. If you have an organization-wide break, have someone on call for emergencies. If possible, rotate this responsibility from day to day, as your security team deserves some holiday relaxation, too.

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Get hands-on cybersecurity training

Employee training is one of our key holiday cybersecurity tips, and that’s especially true for your IT administrators. Our Lookout Cloud Security Hands-on Labs are weekly video meetings that focus on the most pressing topics in cybersecurity. Both existing and prospective Lookout customers can learn about online content filtering, zero trust solutions, phishing protections, adaptive device access, secure collaboration, and other ways to safeguard your organization’s data.