Holiday Hackers and Frolicking Phishers
The winter holidays are a boom time for business—and for cyber attackers! With end-of-year purchasing, travel, and shortened workweeks, most organizations see the same few risks rise to the top.
Following is a quick prioritization if you’re deciding what to worry about most:
First, expect a surge of holiday-themed phishing. “Shipping issue,” “invoice attached,” “bonus update,” and “gift-card request” emails are designed to feel routine in December. One click can hand over credentials or MFA codes, letting criminals hijack email, payroll, or cloud accounts.
Closely related is business email compromise (BEC), where impersonated executives or suppliers push “urgent” wire transfers or last-minute bank-detail changes. Year-end deadlines plus distracted staff make these scams unusually effective, and a single successful message can translate to a six-figure loss.
Ransomware groups like to strike when response teams are thin. Attacks timed for weekends or holiday closures maximize disruption and pressure businesses to pay quickly. If backups, incident contacts, and recovery steps aren’t tested, even a small intrusion can become a prolonged outage that stalls operations precisely when customers are most active.
If you run customer logins or online checkout, anticipate bot traffic. Credential-stuffing tools hammer sign-in pages with recycled passwords from old breaches. The resulting account takeovers drive fraud, customer frustration, and support overload. During peak sales, bots also test stolen cards or scrape inventory, hurting performance when speed matters most.
Finally, watch your suppliers. Seasonal marketing apps, POS plugins, shipping portals, and temporary contractors expand your attack surface overnight. A weak vendor login or rushed integration can become the doorway into your core systems, and you may not notice until after the rush.
So what should you do now?
The technical safeguards are matters of cybersecurity due care. Owners and executives don’t necessarily implement them, but effective executive due diligence means making sure responsibility has been assigned and verifying that appropriate action is actually being taken.
- Tighten email defenses (DMARC/SPF/DKIM, link scanning, and a visible “report phishing” button).
- Require two-person approval for payments or bank-detail changes, and rehearse “out-of-office” incident coverage.
- Turn on rate limits and bot mitigation for logins, enforce strong MFA, and review holiday-only vendors with a plan to remove access in January.
A little pre-holiday hardening goes a long way toward keeping your business merry—and breach-free. But for owners and executives, the first question is simpler: Do you know these things are actually being done?
Join SecureNM™ today for free to begin strengthening your executive due diligence and ensuring your organization is taking appropriate action to become cyber-safe.
