Summer often brings reduced staffing and quieter offices, creating a deceptive calm for businesses. However, this period brings huge advantages for cyber criminals who intensify their activities, with a 30% increase in cyber attacks seen across businesses during holidays and times of staff absence.
This highlights a critical mismatch that attackers aim to exploit, increasing attack campaigns.
Why is the Summer Season Beneficial to Cyber Criminals
Changes in workplace dynamics during summer create perfect ground for cyber adversaries. These changes include:
- Reduced Staffing Levels: People use their annual leave during summer months to enjoy the good weather, spend time with family (especially those with children) and travel.
- Relaxed Vigilance: Humans are vulnerable to fatigue. Working within reduced staffed teams can limit the capacity of team members, causing alert fatigue. This increases the susceptibility to human interaction based attacks like phishing.
- Increased Remote and Mobile Working: With your team having busier schedules in their personal life, it is common to see an increase in remote work. These less controlled environments create new entry points for attackers, especially if using an insecure network, such as public Wi-Fi, or a personal device.
- Detailed Out-of-Office Messages: Overly detailed out of office replies can provide cyber criminals with valuable intelligence, such as exact absence dates, or the names and details of available colleagues. This information can be weaponised to craft highly targeted phishing or impersonation scams.
What To Watch Out For
The season’s risks are clear and can be alarming to businesses. To stay safe, businesses should look out for:
- Phishing and Social Engineering: Phishing remains the predominant cyber threat, with a surge in cleverly crafted emails mimicking legitimate communications. With 85% of UK businesses reporting an incident this threat continues to be a major issue for businesses, especially with AI powered threats increasing the capability and speed at which a cyber attacker can craft a personalised attack.
- Insecure Wi-Fi and Personal Devices: Accessing company data via unsecured public Wi-Fi leaves the data vulnerable to eavesdropping or man in the middle attacks, which is where an attacker sits and intercepts traffic during transit. Similarly, personal devices being used for work and that lack robust security can be a channel for malware to be injected into business infrastructure.
- Supply Chain Attacks: Targeting third party vendors within a supply chain is a growing concern for many businesses. Attackers compromise and breach suppliers to gain access to the client’s network. This critical oversight is often caused by the low formality of supply chain risk review. A recent incident highlighting the significant disruption this can cause is the cyber attack at Marks and Spencer’s, resulting in huge disruption, operational challenges and reputation damage.
How Partnering With CTRL-S Keeps Your Business Protected
At CTRL-S, our proactive cyber security approach safeguards businesses, even when internal teams are enjoying downtime. We do this with:
- 24/7 Proactive Monitoring: Our services never sleep, continuously monitoring networks and systems for anomalies and threats, ensuring immediate detection.
- Robust Endpoint and Network Protection: We deploy advanced Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions, coupled with next generation intrusion prevention systems. This provides your system protection against malware, ransomware and other sophisticated devices. It works with continuous system monitoring, analysing for indicators of compromise and performs automatic remediation.
- Advanced Training and Phishing Simulations: Our Cyber Wise program provides regular training content on the latest cyber threats and guidance, ensuring your team has the knowledge to navigate the challenging threat landscape. We also provide regular targeted phishing simulation training to keep your team sharp, significantly reducing human risk factors for your business.
- Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) Implementation: CTRL-S advocates for and implements MFA across your entire infrastructure. MFA strengthens overall security, prevents phishing and protects against credential stuffing.
- Enhanced Email Security: Comprehensive email security solutions implemented will filter malicious emails, keeping your inbox clear.
- Automated Patch Management & Updates: All software and systems are consistently updated with the latest security patches. This automated process closes known vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. This critical maintenance continues seamlessly, even during holidays.
- Incident Response Planning: We collaborate with your team to create a comprehensive plan, ready to spring into action in the event of an incident occurring. This preparation means your team will know exactly how to respond swiftly and effectively should an incident occur, minimising downtime and reputational damage.
CTRL-S Has Your Teams Back
While the risks increase, it doesn’t mean your worry needs to as well. Fortify your business with CTRL-S, using our team’s extensive knowledge and robust security packages as your defence. Don’t leave your business exposed this summer. Get in touch with CTRL-S today for a cybersecurity health check and discover how our services can provide your business protection.
