The Point: Reduced security teams during vacation periods enable attackers to penetrate systems more quickly and compromise sensitive data.
During holiday periods, cyber threats increase significantly as staffing shortages in IT and security teams provide attackers with advantages. Arctic Wolf warns of longer response times, targeted fraud attacks, and increased risks from mobile working.
When IT and security professionals take vacation, measurable operational risks emerge: response times to security incidents lengthen substantially, giving attackers more time to penetrate infrastructures, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data. Insufficient cover arrangements exacerbate this effect further and delay handling of critical incidents.
In parallel, so-called Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks increase measurably during holiday periods. Cybercriminals exploit out-of-office messages and publicly available information to impersonate supervisors or business partners. When vacation replacements assume decision-making and approval processes, the probability increases dramatically that fraudulent payment requests or manipulated invoices pass through undetected. This represents critical loss of control for CISOs, as existing dual-control principles and approval chains are circumvented.
Added to this is the risk of mobile working: employees who connect to corporate systems via public Wi-Fi networks in hotels, airports, or cafes, or who use private devices, expose credentials to eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Credential theft remains the most frequent attack vector class.
To mitigate risks, Arctic Wolf recommends continuous system monitoring even during holidays, deployment of multi-factor authentication, regular phishing awareness training, and clearly defined cover and emergency procedures. These measures reduce typical vulnerabilities and enable faster anomaly detection and incident response.
Source: www.it-daily.net · Published 4 July 2026
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