Holiday threats have IT teams on their toes

With the holiday season comes family, food, and security risks.

That’s what cyber experts are warning, pointing to how distraction can leave vulnerabilities open and lead to disruption and infiltration.

At times like these, it’s important to maintain basic security hygiene and have faith in your processes, DH2i co-founder and CEO Don Boxley told IT Brew.

“You’ve got to trust your people, trust the systems, and the process that you’ve put in place,” Boxley said.

Danger, Will Robinson! As IT Brew reported last year, IT teams are aware of the threats that can face their companies and organizations. Fraud, out-of-office rules, and older users online all can add up to a variety of threats.

Luckily, security leaders have spent all year preparing for this moment, Boxley told IT Brew, and now’s the time to make sure that the lessons they put in place are listened to.

“You’ve been spending the money, you’ve been spending the resources, you’ve been training your people, you’ve been testing your system so you’re ready,” Boxley said. “So, don’t let yourself get too anxious about it right now.”

Lost in (retail) space. Elieen Haggerty, NETSCOUT area VP of product and solutions marketing, agreed. Haggerty said IT teams in the retail space during the holidays often find themselves doing emergency repairs. An outage like the CrowdStrike incident in July, which shut down airlines, hospitals, and other systems, is the kind of incident that leads teams to put in place changes that can combat potential threats and slippage.

“They’re probably the ones that are trying to figure out a new way of getting ahead of these problems, being more proactive, understanding capacity, and perhaps ahead of time being able to make some alterations before they hit their peak to try to avoid something like this,” Haggerty said.