Preparing your business for holiday cyberattacks

With the holidays fast approaching, cyberattacks and threats are bound to follow. Semperis found roughly half of surveyed organizations were targeted on a holiday or weekend, and nearly 80% of companies cut security/IT staffing by half or more during those windows. Ransomware operators are often already inside the network. They time the detonation for when detection is slowest and the people who can approve pulling the plug are hardest to reach. For jewelers, the holidays are also peak sales season, and attackers know downtime pressure raises the odds of a payout.

So how can you prepare? Jewelers Mutual Group explains the process.

How Can Organizations Strengthen Holiday Cybersecurity?

Start with identity: Stolen credentials are one of the most common ways ransomware gets in. Enforce phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, clean up stale/old accounts and confirm you can recover the identity system itself, not just the data. Put names and tested phone numbers on the holiday on-call list, verify backups are offline and restorable and freeze non-essential changes through the holiday.

This scales down. A single-store jeweler can do it in a weekend:

• Multi-factor authentication on email, banking and point-of-sale
• Automatic backups to a location off the store network
• A paper list of who to call including your IT provider, bank and insurance carrier
• A decision made in advance, with leadership, legal counsel and your insurance carrier, on how you’d respond to a ransom demand
• A house rule that no one wires money on a rushed request without a second person verifying by phone

A mid-size business adds monitoring that's awake when you're not, a tested restore of critical systems and a short tabletop with leadership.

What Organizations Miss in Holiday Cybersecurity

Businesses often miss the human side of the equation when it comes to holiday cybersecurity measures. Plans should assume there will be staff who are traveling or covering three roles. Teams often invest in detection but skip remediation. The same Semperis study found that 90% of organizations say their plans detect identity vulnerabilities, but fewer than half include steps to fix them.

Phishing is one of the most common ways attacks start, and the holidays are prime for phishing because the scams blend in with fake shipping notices, urgent invoices and gift card requests from "the owner." You can't stop every click, so make sure one click doesn't become a crisis. Make it easy to report a suspicious message. Require more than a password to log in so a stolen one is useless. Call back on a number already on file before changing bank details, resetting a login or moving money — no matter who the request appears to come from.

What Makes a Strong Holiday Cybersecurity Plan?

Your cybersecurity plan is ready when you've rehearsed it. Tabletop exercises and drills test the decisions, not the technology. The plan should include:  

• Named on-call coverage through the full holiday
• A decision tree that doesn't depend on finding one person
• Tested backups with a known restore time
• Current vendor and law-enforcement contacts

If you can't answer "what happens if we're hit at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve" in two minutes, you're probably not ready.

Remember: Attackers are planning for your holiday, so you should be, too. And it never hurts to start planning earlier in the year. The organizations that get through these windows are the ones that treat cybersecurity as an ongoing, habitual effort to be prepared, rather than a one-off project.

This story was produced by Jewelers Mutual Group and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.