Cybersecurity threats can occur at any time of the year, but there will always be an increase during the holiday season. This is because of the increase in online shopping activity, more devices that are connected to the internet, and low staffing because of vacation. Here are some common types of threats that may happen during the holiday for companies:

• Phishing Scams

Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted via emails, websites, phone, text message or other tools by attackers to lure an individual or individuals to providing sensitive data including personally identifiable information, banking account information, credit card number, passwords or other login credentials.

We will receive more emails at the end of the year, such as promotion emails, order receipts, or shipping notices. Cybercriminals can insert malicious links or attachments through those emails that can give greater risks to business networks. There are types of phishing scams that your company can have during holiday such as fake order receipt, gift card scam, fake holiday sales and promotions.

• Malware

Malware (Malicious Software) is a program or file that is internationally made by threat actors to harm a computer, network, or devices. Malware examples such as viruses, ransomware, Trojan horses, spyware, crypto jacking, etc.

One of the biggest malware attacks during the holiday was Shamoon Malware on The Saudi Aramco. The attack was started in 2012 when one of the IT team at Saudi Aramco opened a scam email and clicked on a malicious link containing malware, called Shamood. The malware was also known as W32.Distrack is an aggressive, disk-wiping malware that can wipe the master boot records and replace it with various images.

The result of this attack was massive because more than 30,000 workstations at the company were affected. Saudi Aramco technicians had no choice but to rip cables out the backs of computers all over the world. Therefore, every office was physically unplugged from the internet so all the company activities were done manually. Not only that, Saudi Aramco bought 50,000 new hard drives to replace the infected ones.

• Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of cyber threat that uses malware to encrypt files on a computer system then demand a ransom for the decryption key. There are two types of ransomware; crypto-ransomware and locker-ransomware.

Crypto-ransomware encrypts an organisation’s data and demands a payment (ransom) before decrypting and returning the information safely. Locker-ransomware restricts users from accessing files, not encrypting them, before demanding a ransom to unlock the data.  

According to a data report from IBM, ransomware attacks grew and destructive attacks got costlier. In 2022, the average cost of ransomware attack is US$4.54 million and the average cost of a destructive attack is US$5.12 million. The share of breaches caused by ransomware grew 41% in the last year and took 49 days longer than average to identify and contain. Additionally, destructive attacks increased in cost by over USD 430,000.