Whilst your teams rotate around their annual leave, and the pace or place of work maybe relaxes a little – the holiday season doesn’t mean downtime for all. For many cyber criminals it’s an opportunity.
As your managed IT partner, we want to make sure the summer months don’t become the riskiest ones. Here are a few ways in which you can stay cyber secure whilst still enjoying and encouraging any downtime:
Why cyber criminals love holidays
- Infrequent inbox monitoring – successful cyber-attacks spike around holiday periods, mostly because suspicious activity takes longer to spot when people are out of the office or they’re rushing to clear their inbox before or after any time off.
- Valuable out of office messages – attackers also exploit automated out-of-office replies. They know exactly who is unavailable, until when, and who to contact instead. As a result, they can script a well-timed and fairly accurate email claiming to be from a director ‘travelling with limited access’ asking for an urgent payment to be made.
- Catching up on emails when away – public WiFi in airports, hotels and cafés can be convenient but comes with risks. Hackers can easily intercept your data, steal passwords, or infect your device with harmful software. And if you take any devices on holiday they’re more likely to be lost or stolen giving easy access to all of the information on it.
Top tips for summer security
Here’s some best practice from the team at GHM before you set that out-of-office:
- Don’t rush – verify any requests to change bank details, make an urgent payment or share login information. Genuine requests survive a phone call, fraudulent ones don’t.
- Minimise out-of-office messages – state you’re away and give a general contact point, but avoid dates if you can, where you are or a full list of who’s covering what. The same goes for any holiday posts on LinkedIn (not great for home security either).
- Protect devices if they’re away from the office – use a VPN rather than public Wi-Fi, make sure screens lock automatically, and keep a close eye on your devices. If a work device goes missing, report it to either your IT manager or us immediately – we can quickly lock down any risk.
- Update and backup – keep up with system and security updates over the holidays. Schedule them with colleagues or us if you’re away for an extended time. As part of your managed service we keep updates running behind the scenes, but please don’t postpone restarts or defer updates whilst you’re away.
Our security tools run 24/7, but a lot of successful attacks begin with a single person being caught off guard. If anything ever feels off — an unexpected email, a strange login alert, a device that’s gone astray — contact our support desk straight away. We would always rather investigate ten false alarms than miss one real incident.
Have a wonderful, restful summer and together we can make it a secure one too.