Social engineering remains one of the most common ways for threat actors to gain an initial foothold on your network. During the holiday season there will be a surge of phishing campaigns and malicious links following the five themes listed above. Educate your users on spotting and reporting phishing emails, to hover over links before clicking to see if they go to suspicious domains, and to never enable Office macros on downloaded documents unless absolutely certain it is something they expect to receive and there is a business need for the Office macros in the document. Having good endpoint detection with an EDR and a SOC to triage alerts or a managed security service like Binary Defense to triage alerts for you is also crucial because no matter how well you train your employees, someone is eventually going to make a mistake. Catching computer intrusions in the earliest stage is the best way to prevent major damage from ransomware and data breaches.

How to avoid “festive fraud” during the holiday season