Holiday season officially started the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, or Black Friday as it is now known. Taking its name from a term used by police officers in Philadelphia to describe the chaos in the city caused by the deluge of suburban shoppers heading to the city to do their holiday shopping, it has become a day when retailers offer bargains to entice the public to buy their goods and services. While the jury is still out on how good many of those bargains are, the consensus is that there are bargains to be found in stores and online, with the official day for the latter being the Monday after Black Friday – Cyber Monday.
The holiday season for shoppers is boom time for cybercriminals who take advantage of the increase in online shoppers looking to buy gifts for Christmas and pick up a bargain of two. Many people time major purchases to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers and cybercriminals are poised to pounce on the unwary. The losses to scams over the holiday period are staggering. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), more than $73 million was lost to holiday season scams in 2022; however, the true total is likely to be considerably higher since many losses go unreported. Those figures do not include the losses to phishing, malware, ransomware, BEC attacks, and other cyberattacks that occur over the holiday period. For instance, the surge in ransomware attacks over Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas when the IT staff is spread thin.
Given the heightened risk of scams and cyberattacks over the holiday season, consumers should be on their guard and take extra care online and ensure that vendors are legitimate before handing over their card details and double-checking the legitimacy of any email requests. While consumers face elevated risks during the holiday season, so do businesses. There are end-of-year deadlines to meet and it’s a short month with many workers taking annual leave over Christmas and the New Year. As the year draws to a close it is common for vigilance to slip, and threat actors are ready to take advantage. Businesses need to ensure that their defenses are up to scratch, especially against phishing – the most common initial access vector in cyberattacks – as a slip in vigilance can easily lead to a costly cyberattack.
Businesses can take several proactive steps to ensure they are protected against holiday season cyber threats, and conducting a security awareness training session is a good place to start. Employees should be reminded about the increase in malicious cyber activity over the holiday period and be reminded about the risks they may encounter online, via email, SMS, instant messaging services, and the phone. With TitanHQ’s SafeTitan security awareness training platform, it is easy to spin up training courses for employees to remind them to be vigilant and warn them about seasonal and other cyber threats. The training platform makes it quick and easy to create and automate training courses, with the training delivered in modules of no more than 10 minutes to ensure employees can maintain concentration and fit the training into their workflows. The SafeTitan platform also incorporates a phishing simulator, which businesses can use to reinforce training and identify individuals who are fooled by phishing scams and ensure they receive the additional training they need.
Due to the high risk of phishing attacks, it is a good idea to implement an advanced spam filter service, one that reliably identifies and neutralizes phishing and business email compromise attempts and provides cutting-edge protection against malware. You need look no further than SpamTitan for that protection. SpamTitan incorporates machine learning and AI-based detection capabilities for detecting phishing, BEC, and scam emails, and dual antivirus engines and email sandboxing for detecting malware threats, including novel malware variants. In Q3, VirusBulletin’s tests of SpamTitan confirmed a phishing detection rate of 99.99% and a malware catch rate of 99.511%. The interim figures for November 2024 are a 100% phishing catch rate and a 100% malware catch rate, demonstrating the reliability of TitanHQ’s cloud-based email filtering solution.
TitanHQ also offers online protection through the WebTitan DNS filter, which prevents access to known malicious websites, blocks malware downloads from the Internet, and can be used to control the web content employees can access, providing an important extra layer of security against web-based threats. At TitanHQ we hope you have a happy holiday period and above all else that you are well protected against cyber threats. Give the team a call today to find out more about how we can help protect your business this holiday season and beyond.