As you and your team gear up to celebrate Labor Day Weekend, Octillo wants to remind you to be diligent about your incident response preparedness and be mindful of the increased risk of cyber-attacks posed by holidays.
While long weekends may be a great time to perform operational system hygiene and maintenance tasks, our data shows an increased rate of cyber-attacks around major holidays when threat actors can exploit system vulnerabilities with fewer staff on hand to manage a response. We are not alone in our observations. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) put out a joint statement on Tuesday August 31, 2021 outlining the increased risks of data security incidents during holidays. A link to that report can be found below.
If you have not done so recently, we suggest you take the following steps to help mitigate the risk and impact of a data security incident over the long holiday weekend:
- Update and patch systems, including firewalls.
- Update antivirus and endpoint detection software.
- If you use Remote Desktop Protocol (“RDP”), secure and monitor it.
- Don’t click on any suspicious links.
- Check that multi-factor authentication is uniformly in place, especially across systems housing sensitive data.
- Make an offline or cloud-based backup of your important data.
Should you detect any anomalous or concerning behavior, no matter how discrete, we recommend you contact Octillo immediately. Our attorneys are available 24/7 via our Data Breach Hotline.
Call 844.502.9363 or email [email protected] to reach a member of our staff.
