Preparing for Holiday Cyberattacks

The holidays should mean rest and relaxation. Family, friends, food, fresh air, and maybe the odd drink too many. But for security teams, they also mean something else: an open invitation for cybercriminals. Christmas, Easter, Chinese New Year, the summer break, Diwali, and even the humble bank or federal holiday all share one thing in common: Attackers circle like sharks at a pool party when the humans guarding the network are thin on the ground.

“No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.”
- Mark Twain.

CISOs and SecOps rarely get to switch off entirely. Just as airports brace for delays over Christmas and retailers plan for Black Friday crowds, defenders have to expect their own seasonal surge in ‘trouble.’

Why Cyberattacks Spike When We’re Poolside

Attackers aren’t taking a holiday. Many are operating in different time zones, cultures, or countries, where our festive season is just another working day. And they theorize that when an enterprise advertises its company-wide retreat, or when IT support is running a skeleton crew, it’s an open goal.

2025 cybersecurity statistics are rife with examples. Cyberattacks rose 30% during the average holiday season compared to a typical month. Plus, 72% of all cyberattacks occurred on a weekend or holiday, and for ransomware specifically, that climbs to 86%.

‍The equation is simple: reduced vigilance + higher distraction = more opportunities to attack. 

Retailers, in particular, experience a surge in business during the holidays, and bad actors proactively leverage this by timing ransomware attacks to coincide with peak shopping periods. Black Friday and Diwali are a fraud/phishing bonanza. Long shutdowns like Golden Week are perfect for supply chain and industrial targeting. Even something as innocent as an out-of-office auto-reply tips off an attacker about who’s not holding tightly onto the wheel.

Throw in unsecured mobile devices on provincial hostel Wi-Fi, the odd malicious “holiday app,” and new seasonal staff who aren’t security-savvy, and you’ve got a perfect bubbling storm.

Classic holiday-season attack methods:

• Email giveaways: Out-of-office notifications confirm who’s absent.
• Mobile risks: Employees casually checking mail through unvetted apps.
• Public Wi-Fi traps: Like leaving your hotel door ajar, attackers stroll straight in.
• Phishing and smishing: Relaxed minds miss the subtle signs of a fake login page.
• Impersonation: Temporary staff or contractors make social engineering easier, and when the company CEO posts hiking pics to Instagram, it means their account and profile are fair game.

None of these are new tricks. What’s changed is the speed and scale at which they can now be executed, thanks to automation and AI firmly on the attacker’s side.

Preparing for Resilience, not Just Resistance

The old “barricade and hope” model doesn’t cut it anymore. You can’t stop every phishing attempt from hitting inboxes, and you certainly can’t force employees to switch off their phones during Christmas dinner. What you can do is build resilience: a security posture that assumes people will be away, distracted, or human, and still holds firm.

That’s where modern identity-driven security can play an important part. Instead of trying to police every potential holiday mistake, the focus shifts to ensuring that access, privileges, and entitlements don’t create a catastrophic blast radius when they inevitably go wrong.

Just-in-Time Access (JIT)

Rather than keeping the doors permanently unlocked, access can be granted for the precise window it’s needed, and revoked automatically. If a contractor only needs production database rights for two hours, they get them for two hours, not two weeks. Which means if their laptop gets phished on the ski slopes, the attacker is too late.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

Cloud accounts multiply like Easter bunnies. Service identities, forgotten roles, legacy permissions, all of it piles up into entitlement sprawl. CIEM untangles that mess by showing exactly who has access to what across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. During staff holidays, when you can’t afford a breach borne of “we didn’t know that account still had admin rights,” visibility and clarity are everything.

Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM)

Temporary hires, interns, and contractors, oh my. The festive season often brings new people into the mix. ILM ensures those identities are provisioned correctly, monitored while active, and, most importantly, de-provisioned when they leave (or, even, take a break). Otherwise, you risk handing your January incident investigation a neatly wrapped gift: an old account with standing privileges that should have been switched off weeks ago.

Multi-Cloud Coordination

Very few SMEs run neatly on a single cloud. Most have a tangle of SaaS, IaaS, and hybrid infrastructure. A central control plane that stretches across environments, offering multi-cloud security, matters doubly during holidays, because staff are too thinly spread to hop from one provider’s dashboard to another. AWS, Google Workspace, or Azure, unified policy enforcement and clear visibility close the gaps attackers love.

ChatOps Integrations

If there’s one thing employees still check on holiday, it’s that ping from Slack or Teams. Security that plugs directly into those collaboration channels turns approvals and alerts into something people will actually see (and act on) between the slopes and après-ski. JIT access granted via chat, incident alerts pushed straight into the channel. Suddenly, “holiday coverage” doesn’t mean a hundred missed calls.

People: Still The First and Last Line

Even with all the automation in the world, people remain central. A well-timed refresher before the holidays, “Think before you click,” “Avoid public Wi-Fi,” “Lock your device,” costs little and saves plenty. Awareness campaigns don’t have to be preachy; they can be woven into the same holiday messages HR sends about dress codes for the office party.

And critically, leadership needs to model the right behavior. If managers are blithely emailing company strategy decks from a poolside iPad, the rest of the team will follow.

What Good Preparation Looks Like

• Baseline before the break: Audit who has access to what, and trim unnecessary permissions.
• Automate revocation: Don’t rely on someone to remember to “switch off” accounts; let policy engines do it.
• Integrate alerts into comms: Holidays aren’t the time to depend on obscure dashboards. Push signals where people already are.
• Test incident playbooks: Make sure automated de-provisioning and isolation actually fire under simulated attack conditions.

These aren’t “nice to haves.” They’re table stakes if you want to stop your company from being tomorrow’s seasonal breach headline.

A Realistic Holiday Wish

The truth is, cybercriminals don’t take the day after the Super Bowl off. They don’t toast St. Patrick, they don’t queue for Easter eggs, and they certainly don’t wait politely until your SOC is back to full strength. They strike when organizations are at their weakest.

But with modern identity-first controls like CIEM, JIT, ILM, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, and ChatOps integration, you can shift the odds back in your favor. You don’t need to ban holidays, go full Scrooge and cancel the festive party, or keep your engineers chained to their desks. You just need to make sure that when an account is compromised, it’s got nothing useful to give away.

So yes, pack the barbecue buns, buy the sunscreen, and double-check you’ve packed your passport. But put “check the access controls” at the top of the list too. People don’t need access when they’re on the shuttle to their hotel. It might be the one holiday ritual that keeps the company intact for many seasons to come.