Nowhere to Hide: Don't Let Your Guard Down This Holiday Season

For many people around the world, 2020 has been a deeply challenging year. Fear and uncertainty have shaped their lives personally and professionally. At the same time, accelerated digital transformations have been thrust upon countless organizations. In the midst of this adversity, an ever-growing cohort of cyber-threat actors has seized on 2020's challenges as the ultimate opportunity.

Unfortunately, 2020 has already claimed the regrettable title of having the "highest number of potential intrusions uncovered by Falcon OverWatch in a calendar year."

Adversaries Don't Vacation
Organizations will naturally look toward the holiday season as an opportunity for employees to regroup and recharge. But defenders should be proactively working to harden their defenses to ensure that any operational downtime doesn't become an open door for threats. Both state-sponsored and e-crime actors have remained highly active through the second half of 2020.

Fig. 2. OverWatch observed intrusion campaigns increasing throughout 2019 and into 2020. Source: CrowdStrike

Opportunistic e-crime actors have found 2020 to be a particularly lucrative year. It is continuing to make gains on state-sponsored activity; e-crime now comprises 82% of all intrusions uncovered by OverWatch (where it was possible to make attribution to a high degree of confidence). One particularly disappointing development from e-crime threat actors has been the widespread ransomware attacks against the healthcare industry, resulting in potentially serious delays in patient care. This should show organizations across all sectors the extreme lengths that today's e-crime actors will go to in pursuit of profit.

Fig. 3. In 2020, e-crime intrusions gained ground over state-sponsored attacks compared to 2019. Source: CrowdStrike

Threat hunters routinely observe threat actors staging their campaigns outside of business hours or during holiday periods, when it is perceived that organizations' defenses will be weaker. Knowing this helps defenders make decisions to ensure business resiliency during these periods to keep their environment safer.

Holiday Season Security Checklist
Before settling in for the holidays, I strongly recommend that defenders address five key areas of defense that will be critical to preventing intrusions at the end of 2020: