The holiday season is a time when hardworking employees relax — and hardworking threat actors look for their next victims. As workers buy more products online, take seasonal trips, and give in to holiday distractions, large organizations become tempting targets for cyber attacks. Phishing, ransomware, and similar threats may be even more effective than usual in the last few months of the year. That means the impact of cyber attack strategies can also be more significant.

While many businesses wind down during the holiday season, cyber criminals ramp up their efforts instead. E-commerce sites are obvious targets, but threat actors target cloud services providers, financial institutions, and social media networks just as often — if not more — during the holidays. Whatever your organization does, you’ll want to follow a few holiday cybersecurity tips to safeguard your sensitive data and protect your staff as the year comes to a close.

For most people, the holidays may be a time for winding down and taking a break. For cyber criminals, it’s just the opposite. With many of your staff out of the office or signing in remotely, and a large percentage of business being done at the end of the year, organizations are a prime target for cyber threats on and around the holidays. To protect your organization, you’ll want to enact a firm security framework.

The holidays are a hectic time. It’s often the busiest sales period of the year, generating the lion’s share of revenue for many organizations. At the same time, employees are wrapping up their big projects before the office closes for the winter break. Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to work around increasingly packed schedules while caring for their personal and family needs.

For an enterprise business, the holidays can be a mixed bag. On the one hand, depending on your industry, you’re either winding down or doing the most business you’ll do all year. On the other, you’re especially vulnerable to holiday hacking attempts. Your customer data makes your organization an attractive target at a time when employee vacation time and office closures mean you have fewer employees to guard against holiday hackers.

The holidays are a busy time for cyber attackers. They rely on distracted workers and lax security systems to breach an organization’s defenses. Then, they deploy ransomware or perform smash-and-grab operations on as much information as they can get their hands on. Either way, the goal is the same: profiting from a brief moment of weakness in your cybersecurity defenses. If you’re wondering how to prevent hacking during this hectic time of year, Lookout is here to help.

No matter your industry, the end-of-year holiday season is typically a busy time. Unfortunately, it’s also a busy time for cyber criminals. Enterprise organizations are particularly vulnerable to modern data breaches and other attacks during the holidays, which means you must be especially vigilant about guarding against them.

A remote workforce is a uniquely powerful thing. It allows an organization to recruit and retain the best talent for the job regardless of their ability to report to an office suite every morning. Yet, as a certain comic book uncle once informed his young nephew, with great power comes great responsibility. To meet that responsibility of providing both access and security, you need to know how to implement zero trust.

Last year, organizations all around the world collectively suffered more than 10,000 data breaches. These attacks may have exposed more than 360 million people to potential cyber threats, from identity theft to ransomware. As remote employment, cloud computing, and mobile devices become more common in the workplace, threat actors have more methods than ever to compromise legitimate accounts and steal sensitive data.

The increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, the proliferation of cloud services, and the new normal of remote work have all changed the modern cybersecurity landscape. As traditional perimeter-based approaches to security become increasingly vulnerable to these modern cyber threats, zero trust has emerged as the modern security strategy of choice. Zero trust architecture is critical for any organization seeking to improve resilience, reduce breach risk, and enhance data protection.

Zero trust has become one of modern security’s most prominent strategies. Zero trust architecture is based on the fundamental idea that every network, user, and system must be verified consistently, instead of granting trust based on past access. Although zero trust is a commonly accepted practice today, it’s important to understand the pivotal role that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plays in defining zero trust architecture and other cybersecurity frameworks.

Every day, threat actors devise new plans for breaking into secure systems. The steps they take, from researching a target to carrying out the attack, are known as the cyber kill chain. Traditionally, that kill chain has targeted devices and networks that lie completely within your organization’s control. For better or worse, mobile and cloud-based work have upended that dynamic.

Organizations that work in the cloud face an increasing number of potential threats every day. Fortunately, automated detection and response can block many of these lower-level threats before they even require human attention. Unfortunately, that means the threats that evade automated defenses may be perpetrated by driven and sophisticated attackers — the kinds of threat actors who can infiltrate a system and remain undetected for up to 280 days on average.

Every day, cybersecurity researchers discover dozens of new vulnerabilities, malware packages, and cyber criminals. One way for IT teams to stay on top of these threats is to monitor threat intelligence feeds. These databases provide real-time information on both established and emerging cyber threats, allowing organizations to catalog and analyze the results. This is particularly salient in the era of hybrid and remote work, as mobile devices are particularly tempting targets for cyber attacks.