The most dangerous moment in cybersecurity isn’t during peak business hours with people logged in on their systems.. It’s when nothing seems to be happening.
Holidays create the perfect illusion of calm: figure it out, it’s a dream coming true with offices empty out, Slack slows down, SOC dashboards get quieter, approval chains stretch thin and people log out mentally long before they log out of systems.
Same ol’ story: attackers DO know this.
So they don’t launch loud campaigns during holidays and they don’t need ransomware fireworks. They prefer persistence: identity abuse thrives when no one is actively watching.
During holiday weeks, the attack surface doesn’t shrink. It expands.
Sessions stay alive longer than usual, VPNs remain connected “just in case” – ok, this point needs another couple of words: working remotely DOES NOT MEAN security is ok just because you use a VPN (mannaggia a voi!).
Admin access is granted preemptively to avoid blocking work. Temporary permissions become semi-permanent because no one wants to deal with access requests during vacation – everything’s familiar, right?
Identity doesn’t take holidays.
Monitoring does.
Most holiday breaches start with something boring: a valid session, an unrevoked account, a forgotten integration. No exploit required and no malware needed. Just an identity that still works.
What happens then? Phishing campaigns adapt too. Messages are framed as “quick approvals before Christmas”, “last invoice of the year”, “urgent request while you’re offline”, and the new entry: “Happy Christmas Team, my Season’s Greetings for you all. Yours truly, the Boss XD“.
Authority is impersonated because hierarchy matters more when teams are fragmented.
Detection slows down. Response slows down. Escalation paths blur. And everyone’s happy the “Boss” is finally on holiday without further bothering.
But attackers don’t rush.. they wait.
By the time someone asks “was this expected?”, the answer doesn’t matter anymore.
Holiday security isn’t about locking everything down.
It’s about understanding that identity risk compounds when attention drops – and, more about this: in the latest 11 months we’ve seen impersonation and deepfakes double the risk layer, with a common pattern. The organizations that get breached in January usually made the mistake in December.
That’s not because they were careless, but because they assumed nothing would happen while everyone was away.
And security was left at minimum sign.
The reasons may vary, from “we have a firewall” (NO!) to “my friend is taking care” (NO!), and all of them are a big fail for YOUR security.
That assumption is the real vulnerability.
Now think again: is YOUR business ready for holidays?
Chief Marketing Officer • social engineer OSINT/SOC/HUMINT • cyberculture • security analyst • polymath • COBOL programmer • nerd • retrogamer
