With Christmas and New Year's Day falling on a Sunday this year, many people may be planning vacations the week between the two holidays. Michael Moore, founder of the Southlake-based IT service firm, M3 Networks, says this week is the busiest of the year.
"The hackers do not take any time off," he says. "In fact, there's more damage done during the holidays due to cyberattacks than at any point in the year."
Moore says more people are taking vacations and are less likely to be paying attention to items like email or network security.
"They take their eyes off the ball and try to relax a little bit," he says. "That's when the bad actors go into overtime."
Moore issues can start with people who use an "out of office" reply. He says a hacker may send emails and use automatic replies to learn more about how long someone might be on vacation. He urges people to either set automatic replies to only go to those in their contacts list or not list dates they will be absent.
"Imagine a bad actor who hasn't compromised your email yet but would like to," he says. "Well, lovingly, you provided that information."
Moore says many companies will give their IT staffs the week off. He says hackers know that and will use the week between Christmas and New Year's to try to exploit weaknesses in a system.
He urges companies to always keep an IT person on duty or use an outside company.
"Someone should be alerting you, just like if you got alerted from your buddy if your Facebook account got hacked, and somebody posted on your profile. A lot of people would be calling you saying, 'what's going on?' The same thing should be happening in your business and your personal life," Moore says.
Moore says companies can also protect themselves by requiring two-factor authentication to log into email or a computer system. He says that can also apply to individuals.
"One of the things you have to know is that while you take time off for Christmas, New Year's, Hanukkah, whatever it is you celebrate, the hackers do not take time off," Moore says.
Long-term, Moore says each email, social media and company network account should have an individual password. Instead of a password, he urges people to use a "passphrase" that might be easy for the user to remember but difficult to hack.
He says smaller companies may not be able to afford an in-house cyber security team that works all year, but he says hackers target periods when those companies are likely to be short-staffed.
"What you have to do today is enable cybersecurity," he says. "Whether you have an in-house team or an external team, that team has to be doing a whole lot of things to help you not just enable these IT principles but help you keep your money."
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