Rise in Cyberattacks During the Holidays

Holiday season always seems to be a peak period for cyberattacks throughout the world for businesses. Unlike employees who take this time off to celebrate the holiday with their family and friends, cybercriminals would argue not only that the holiday season is here, but that the holidays are their favorite time of year. Given that businesses all across the world are out of the office for a few days, many IT networks are unsupervised. This creates the perfect window of opportunity for cybercriminals to hack weak networks. 

According to Cloudwards.net, the rate of cybercrime increased by 600% during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, companies have been given no choice but to implement new practices and protocols in response to the rise in these attacks. Not only is it important for companies to strengthen their networks security, but to continue to educate their employees on the signs of a ransomware attack. "78% of organizations say their security awareness training activities resulted in measurably lower phishing susceptibility, but 31% of employees failed a phishing test" (cloudwards.net). Therefore, companies who have their employees complete training activities have found it to be beneficial to their business's security.

During this period shopping websites themselves invest all their resources to increase the volume of purchases. Unfortunately, as they say, along with the opportunities, come the risks. It is important to stay informed of the most recent statistics based on holiday cyberattacks.

• 49% of Phishing attacks results in malware infections
• 60% of organizations have suffered a direct loss following an impersonation attack 
• 2.1m domain tied to phishing attacks
• 96% of Businesses Face Phishing 
• 1,025,968 total phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2022 along

Nobody ever thinks their company could fall victim to a cyberattack, but the truth is, everyone can become a victim. No matter the size of the business, or the layers and layers of complete IT security they have in place, hackers have the resources to outsmart even the most secure networks.  

Sources: mimecast.com, cloudwards.net