While the holiday season is a great time to relax and take time off work, it’s prime time for hackers who want to steal a business’ data. Since threat actors know that many employees will be on vacation and any remaining staff may be more distracted, they’ll often increase their attacks over the holidays. Fortunately, businesses can reduce the risk of cyber attacks affecting their important data by following a few best practices designed to protect their systems, devices, and data from holiday cyber attacks.
How Much Do Cyber Attacks Increase During the Holidays?
The main type of cyber attack that increases during the holidays is ransomware. In fact, a recent study found that the average number of ransomware attacks increased by 30% during the holiday period. Besides watching out for ransomware, organizations may face an increased threat from social engineering attempts, hacking attacks, and other types of malware.
Why Do Cyber Attacks Increase During the Holidays?
The reason for increased cyber attacks during the holidays comes down to businesses being more vulnerable. One key vulnerability comes from IT teams and other key staff members taking time off work. If your business’s entire IT team is out for the holidays or only a skeleton crew remains, the chance of a successful ransomware or other cyber attack increases a great deal. Without a full team, your remaining staff is more likely to be distracted and less equipped to respond quickly to ransomware attacks.
Alongside having fewer employees, companies often face more network requests and traffic, especially if they serve the consumer market. Greater network traffic makes it easier for distributed denial-of-service attacks to disrupt the normal traffic of a network, service, or server. Additionally, while phishing attempts are more likely to trick consumers, employees can also fall for these scams, resulting in malware affecting your network and data being stolen.
3 Tips for Preparing for Cyber Attacks During the Holidays
Since cyber attacks increase during the holidays and organizations are often more vulnerable to them due to a number of factors, organizations must take steps to protect themselves from ransomware and other cyber crimes. As you get your business ready for the holidays, review our top three tips for preparing for cyber attacks:
1. Create an Incident Response Plan and Conduct Cyber Security Awareness Training
One of the best ways to reduce the threat of cyber attacks is to create an incident response plan. These plans give your team instructions on how they should respond to a cyber attack. Typically, an incident response plan will include the following:
- Initial action plans that state what your team should do to understand the attack and determine the main systems affected by it.
- Legal requirements your organization should follow after a cyber attack.
- Communication plans for alerting internal and external stakeholders about the attack.
- An outline of steps your team should take to maintain or restart affected operations.
- A comprehensive investigation plan designed to find out why the attack was successful, determine what monitoring needs are needed to prevent similar attacks, and identify possible solutions for removing malware and effectively recovering from the attack.
- Details about how to conduct a strategic review process that aims to increase security efforts following the attack.
After you’ve created your incident response plan, you should review it with team members. You’ll also want to implement cyber security awareness training programs that cover the main threats that impact your industry and give instructions to employees on how to respond to these threats.
2. Ensure All Your Cybersecurity Systems Are Updated
While your IT team prepares for the holidays, they should make sure to scan your systems and devices for vulnerabilities. If they find a vulnerability, they should immediately patch it to prevent threat actors from exploiting it. They should also update any security software your company uses to ensure hackers can’t take advantage of flaws in the older version of the software.
3. Back Up All Your Data to a Third Party Provider’s Secure Cloud
Before you close your business for the holidays, you can protect your data from ransomware by backing it up to a cloud backup provider’s servers. As a key component of disaster recovery plans and an effective way to significantly reduce the risk of ransomware, regularly backing up your device’s data to a third-party’s cloud can ensure your organization won’t feel tempted to pay a ransom.
During a standard ransomware attack, the ransomware will infect a company device and lock your organization out from accessing the files stored on it. The hackers will then state you have to pay a ransom to receive the decryption key to unlock your data. If you don’t have your data backed up, you’ll be far more tempted to pay this ransom, even though there’s no guarantee the cyber attackers will actually give you the key once you pay them.
Though third-party cloud backups won’t stop ransomware attacks from occurring, they can eliminate the temptation to pay a ransom. If you work with an endpoint data backup provider, they’ll regularly make copies of your data and upload them to their secure cloud. Since this data is stored off-site in a location unaffected by the ransomware attack on your devices, you can simply remove the ransomware from all your company’s devices and restore the lost data from the cloud.
Choose CrashPlan for Ransomware Recovery Solutions
The increased threat of ransomware during the holidays makes ransomware recovery solutions a must for any company. At CrashPlan, our endpoint backup solutions can automatically back up your data every 15 minutes. These continuous backups are kept on our secure servers, and we use leading encryption technology to secure your data while at rest or in transit. If a ransomware attack is successful, you can expect to quickly restore any lost data after the cyber attack is dealt with.Learn more about our ransomware recovery solutions today. If you want to see how CrashPlan can guard your data from ransomware attacks, sign up for our free trial.
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