Protecting Your Business During the Busy Holiday Season
Written By: Frank Saulsbery
The holiday season transforms business operations in fundamental ways. Customer activity surges, staff juggle increased workloads alongside personal holiday obligations, and everyone feels the pressure of year-end deadlines. Unfortunately, cybercriminals understand these patterns perfectly and deliberately increase their attacks during this vulnerable period. They know businesses are distracted, staff are stretched thin, and the combination of urgency and reduced vigilance creates ideal conditions for successful attacks. Protecting your business during the holidays requires understanding the specific threats that emerge during this season and taking proactive steps to defend against them.
Why Holidays Create Perfect Attack Conditions
Cybercriminals aren't randomly launching attacks throughout the year. They strategically time their efforts to exploit known vulnerabilities in business operations and human behavior. The holiday season creates a nearly perfect storm of conditions that attackers actively target.
Increased transaction volumes during holiday shopping mean more legitimate emails about orders, shipping notifications, and payment confirmations flowing through business systems. This legitimate traffic provides perfect camouflage for phishing emails designed to look like shipping notifications from major carriers or payment confirmations from financial institutions. When your staff are processing hundreds of legitimate transactions, that one malicious email blends in seamlessly until someone clicks without thinking.
Staff distraction reaches peak levels during holidays as employees balance increased work demands with personal holiday obligations. They're thinking about shopping lists, family gatherings, travel plans, and year-end deadlines simultaneously. This mental overload reduces the careful attention that normally catches suspicious emails or unusual requests. Attackers deliberately craft messages that exploit this distraction, using urgent language that bypasses critical thinking.
Reduced staffing during holiday periods means fewer people covering more responsibilities. The colleague who normally reviews suspicious emails might be on vacation. The manager who typically approves unusual payment requests might be unavailable. Attackers exploit these coverage gaps, timing their attacks for maximum effectiveness when response capabilities are most limited.
Year-end financial activity creates additional vulnerability as businesses rush to complete transactions, close books, and process payments before year-end deadlines. This urgency makes staff more likely to expedite requests without normal verification procedures. Attackers send fake invoices, fraudulent payment requests, and bogus year-end financial documents designed to exploit this time pressure.
Understanding these patterns helps you recognize when your business is most vulnerable and take appropriate precautions during high-risk periods rather than maintaining the same security posture year-round.
Common Holiday Threats to Watch For
Holiday-specific threats take advantage of seasonal activities and expectations to appear legitimate. Knowing what to watch for dramatically improves your ability to recognize and avoid these attacks.
Fake Shipping Notifications
Emails claiming to be from major carriers like UPS, FedEx, or USPS with links to track packages or resolve delivery problems that actually lead to malicious websites or malware downloads.
Fraudulent Order Confirmations
Messages appear to confirm purchases or subscriptions that recipients don't remember making, prompting them to click links or call phone numbers to dispute the charges.
Charity Scams
Appeals from fake charitable organizations or impersonations of legitimate nonprofits are designed to steal payment information or credentials under the guise of holiday giving.
Gift Card Schemes
Emails appearing to come from executives or supervisors requesting urgent gift card purchases for clients or employees, a simple scam that succeeds surprisingly often.
Year-End Tax Documents
Fake notices about W-2 forms, 1099s, or other year-end tax documents requiring immediate action to avoid penalties, actually designed to steal personal and financial information.
Holiday Party Invitations
Malicious emails disguised as holiday party invitations or e-cards that deliver malware when recipients click to view the invitation or card.
Seasonal Discount Offers
Too-good-to-be-true promotions from retailers or suppliers offering unrealistic discounts to entice clicks on malicious links or fraudulent purchase pages.
These threats succeed because they mirror legitimate seasonal communications that businesses and individuals actually expect to receive during holidays, making them harder to distinguish from authentic messages without careful scrutiny.
Protecting Your Business Operations
Effective holiday security requires a combination of technical measures and human vigilance, adjusted to account for the unique pressures and patterns of the season.
Technical protections should be strengthened before holiday periods begin. Review your email filtering and spam detection to ensure they're catching the latest phishing techniques. Update antivirus and security software across all systems. Verify that firewalls and network security measures are properly configured and functioning. Test backup systems to confirm they're working correctly and you can actually recover data if needed. These technical foundations create the first line of defense against holiday attacks.
Email security deserves particular attention during high-volume periods. Consider implementing additional scrutiny for emails containing links or attachments, especially those appearing to come from shipping companies, financial institutions, or unfamiliar senders. Add warning banners to external emails so staff immediately see when a message originates outside your organization. Implement URL filtering that checks links before allowing clicks, catching malicious websites before they can deliver malware.
Payment and financial controls need reinforcement during year-end processing periods. Require multi-person verification for payment requests over certain thresholds. Implement callback verification for any unusual payment requests, using known phone numbers rather than contact information provided in the request itself. Separate duties so no single person can initiate and approve significant financial transactions. These controls prevent both external fraud and internal mistakes during high-pressure periods.
Access management becomes critical when regular staff are out and temporary coverage is in place. Ensure that employees have appropriate access for their actual duties but nothing more. Review administrative access and remove unnecessary privileges before holiday periods begin. Implement session timeouts so unattended systems automatically lock. These measures limit potential damage if credentials do get compromised during vulnerable periods.
Training Your Team for Holiday Awareness
Your staff represent both your greatest vulnerability and your strongest defense during holiday periods. Effective training makes the difference between successful attacks and caught threats.
Pre-holiday security briefings should highlight specific threats likely to appear during the upcoming season. Don't just repeat general security training. Show actual examples of holiday-themed phishing emails, fake shipping notifications, and seasonal scams targeting businesses like yours. Help staff understand what current attacks look like so they can recognize them in real traffic.
Create simple decision trees that help staff quickly evaluate suspicious messages without requiring deep technical knowledge. If an email claims to be from a shipping company but you didn't order anything, it's suspicious. If a message creates urgent pressure to act immediately without verification, it's suspicious. If a request bypasses normal procedures because of holiday deadlines, it requires verification before action. These practical guidelines help people make good security decisions under pressure.
Establish clear verification procedures for high-risk situations. How should staff verify unusual payment requests? What's the process for confirming unexpected orders or shipments? Who do they contact with security questions when regular managers are unavailable? Clear procedures prevent hesitation and ensure that even temporary staff can respond appropriately to suspicious situations.
Encourage reporting without fear of criticism. Staff need to know that if they click something suspicious or think they might have made a mistake, reporting it immediately is the right thing to do. Frame security awareness as a team responsibility rather than an individual failure. The faster potential problems get reported, the faster they can be contained before causing serious damage.
Managing Vendor and Partner Risks
Holiday security extends beyond your internal operations to include the vendors, partners, and suppliers your business interacts with during this busy season.
1. Verify Unexpected Communications
Contact vendors directly using known contact information to confirm that emails claiming to be from regular suppliers with new payment instructions or urgent requests are legitimate, as attackers frequently impersonate known vendors, knowing that busy staff are likely to quickly process familiar requests without verification.
2. Vet New Vendor Relationships Carefully
Exercise caution about new vendor relationships initiated during holiday periods, carefully vetting new suppliers rather than rushing into relationships because of year-end deadlines or attractive holiday promotions, as attackers often create fake vendor personas to establish relationships and subsequently exploit them.
3. Review Partner Access Levels
Examine access levels for partners and vendors who connect to your systems to determine if they really need the current access they have, when it was last reviewed, and whether vendors with access no longer actively work with you, cleaning up excessive access before holiday periods when your ability to respond to compromised vendor credentials is most limited.
4. Understand Vendor Security Practices
Learn about your vendors' security practices, especially those handling sensitive data or financial transactions on your behalf, recognizing that their security weaknesses become your vulnerabilities, and you still face the consequences even if the initial breach wasn't in your systems.
Your security is only as strong as the weakest link in your vendor and partner network, making third-party risk management essential during vulnerable holiday periods.
Post-Holiday Security Review
The period immediately following holidays provides valuable opportunities to assess how your security measures performed and identify areas needing improvement.
Review security logs and alerts from the holiday period. Were there attempted attacks that got blocked? Were there suspicious activities that warranted further investigation? Understanding what actually happened provides insight into threats targeting your business and whether your defenses performed as expected.
Gather feedback from staff about security challenges they encountered during the holidays. Were security procedures too cumbersome under holiday pressures? Did they encounter situations where they weren't sure how to proceed? Were there false alarms that wasted time? This practical feedback helps refine security measures to balance protection with operational reality.
Test incident response capabilities before the next holiday cycle. If something had gone seriously wrong during the holidays, would your response have been effective? Do you have clear procedures for containing breaches, communicating with stakeholders, and recovering operations? Testing these capabilities during calm periods prepares you for actually needing them during busy ones.
Update security measures based on lessons learned and emerging threats. What worked well during the last holiday season? What gaps became apparent? What new threats emerged that your defenses didn't adequately address? Continuous improvement ensures that each holiday season benefits from lessons learned in previous ones.
Building Resilience for Future Seasons
Long-term holiday security requires building organizational resilience that withstands seasonal pressures rather than just implementing temporary measures during high-risk periods.
Develop holiday-specific security protocols that acknowledge seasonal realities rather than expecting the same security practices year-round. These protocols should account for increased transaction volumes, reduced staffing, and time pressures that characterize holiday operations. Realistic security measures that work within these constraints get followed. Unrealistic measures get ignored.
Cross-train staff so that critical security functions don't depend on single individuals who might be unavailable during holidays. Multiple people should understand how to respond to security alerts, investigate suspicious activities, and implement emergency measures. This redundancy ensures capability even when regular security staff are out.
Establish relationships with security partners before emergencies happen. If you need external help during a holiday security incident, you don't want to be searching for qualified providers while under attack. Existing relationships mean faster response when minutes matter.
Document everything so that even temporary holiday staff can handle security situations appropriately. Clear, accessible documentation bridges gaps when experienced staff are unavailable and provides consistent guidance regardless of who's covering at any given moment.
Moving Forward with Confidence
Holiday seasons will always bring increased security challenges. Attackers will continue exploiting the combination of urgency, distraction, and reduced vigilance that characterizes this period. But understanding these threats and implementing appropriate defenses dramatically reduces your vulnerability. You can't eliminate risk entirely, but you can ensure that your business isn't the easy target attackers prefer.
Start preparing before holiday seasons arrive rather than reacting to threats after they appear. Strengthen technical defenses, train your team on seasonal threats, establish clear procedures for high-risk situations, and build relationships with partners who can support you if something goes wrong. The time invested in preparation pays dividends in prevented incidents, faster response when problems do occur, and confidence that your business can handle the holiday season securely.
Network Solutions Unlimited is a generational managed IT services provider based in Decatur, Illinois, serving businesses and nonprofits with genuine support and decades of trusted relationships. Led by Baily Saulsbery and founded by her father Frank, we're not just your IT provider; we're your neighbors who happen to be really good at technology. Contact us today to experience IT support that actually cares.
