Holiday season ripe for disruption, cyber threats

Well, the weather outside is frightful, but inside it’s so…honestly, it’s also scary, at least from an IT security perspective.

With the annual surge in online shopping ahead of the holidays, scammers, hackers, and fraudsters are eager to take aim at a whole range of new targets, including consumers who aren’t as tech-savvy as more frequent online shoppers.

Preying on plastic. With people spending billions of dollars online every holiday season in the US alone, the potential for fraud is high. Checking your bank and credit card statements and making sure there aren’t fraudulent charges on your account is a good, easy way to manage the danger. Then there are phishing scams, which target personal email addresses, using recognizable retailers in the messages to establish credibility.

“It’s a bit cliché, but I think many of these crimes would be prevented if people just kept that in their heads,” Gen Director of Privacy Innovations Iskander Sanchez-Rola told CNET.

OOO. Leaving the office for vacation between Christmas and New Year’s opens the door to threats, both physical and online. NordLayer CTO Juta Gurinaviciute wrote for Forbes that staff should use strong passwords, protect systems from cyberattacks, and secure physical office space.

“Prevention is the most effective way to fight cybercrime,” Gurinaviciute wrote.

The risk is compounded because IT teams are often understaffed over the holidays. As IT Brew reported last year, organizations are particularly vulnerable then; reduced hours don’t mean reduced attacks, as Doug Saylors, partner and cybersecurity unit leader at consulting firm ISG, told us.

Not those, grandpa. People with unsophisticated understandings of security are uniquely vulnerable at this time, meaning that their more techie friends and relatives need to warn them about passwords, two factor authentication, online financial protection, and more.

Some local and state government agencies, like North Carolina’s Department of Information Technology, and state officials like Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, are issuing guidance and tips to protect consumers.

Gift card scams are also on the rise around this time of year. If your employer texts you from an unrecognized phone number asking you to pick up cards for the other staffers and promises to pay you back, that’s almost certainly a phishing attempt.