Holidays Require Increased Security Focus

Holidays bring a surge in online shopping, financial transactions, and travel bookings. And cybercriminals are paying attention. They know activity is up and they may be able to take advantage of less staffing or vigilance when it comes to protection. Thus, holiday and vacation periods carry higher risk of cyberattack.

On the personal side, scrutinize your online transactions more carefully when shopping. Look for website addresses that contain misspellings. Be wary of urgent requests for bank details or password information over the phone.

Retailers should already have a layered security strategy with people, processes, and technologies ready to respond to any disruption. Without robust plans, they risk having systems offline during a disruption — and restoration could take days or even weeks. Even worse are potential damage to the brand and compliance penalties if an attack exposes private consumer data. Ensuring secure backup of transactional data is crucial during this high-volume period. Reliability and the ability to recover data are critical.

In geographic regions where weather is a factor, an incident affecting utility infrastructure can disrupt critical necessities like heating for basic living but also facilities like hospitals, government agencies, and businesses.

Staying Cybersmart

Staying cybersmart regardless of season is important. Issues ranging from vast data growth to mounting regulations and cyber threats require new approaches to data protection. Multifaceted cybersecurity measures like multifactor authentication, better training, endpoint detection, anomaly detection, and backup-and-recovery system firewalls are equally important. Regular assessments and worst-case scenario tabletop exercises and rehearsals are useful activities.

New technologies are proving valuable when it comes to improving cybersecurity. Emerging capabilities include automated backups, AI-powered anomaly detection, self-healing Kubernetes containers, and biometric identification. 

Basic cyber hygiene is perhaps the most important. These tactics include:

• Ensuring software and firmware systems are up to date with the latest patches and versions

• Using encryption both when data is at rest and on the move.

• Setting tight restrictions and assigning role-based rather than individual user access rights to reduce the risk of alteration or deletion of data, whether accidental or malicious

Regular testing your backup processes to verify efficiency and dependability. Then, if there is a problem, you can more quickly get systems up and running.

Backup Best Practices

Maintaining robust backups is the only way to assure an effective post-incident recovery. In today’s cyber risk–filled world, there are tools, techniques, and procedures that represent industry best practices.

One approach is to implement regular 3-2-1 backups. The 3-2-1 method means that you:

• Make three copies of crucial data on a pre-determined schedule.

• Store backup copies on two different mediums, such as cloud, on-premises, or off-site.

Make one copy immutable, as in unable to be changed. A best-case scenario is to employ an isolated recovery environment, providing a space to rebuild data sets and applications rapidly to avoid costly business disruptions.

Bolster data security by prioritizing prevention, strengthening defenses, and ensuring clean and confident recovery processes. With more resilient strategies in place, teams can enjoy the holidays with confidence in the security of their systems and information.

A holistic, multi-layered, and comprehensive cybersecurity strategy is the best defense against downtime and data loss due to malware infiltration. Veritas understands that this can be a complex challenge. For more information on how we help you strengthen cyber resiliency, read about our Veritas 360 Defense.