There are many reasons to love holidays. Great food, great company, and time to relax while offices across the country close. 

At least, that's why most of us love holidays. Cyber criminals, on the other hand, have their own reasons. 

Though summer typically represents a lull between the spiked attack rates of tax season and the winter holidays, July 4th weekend is a known primetime for data breaches. Here's why:

#1: Hackers join the party while your defense team is offline.

Independence Day Weekend is a time where most of your staff will be gathered around grills and pools, not laptops and cyber monitoring software. For many law firms toting small IT teams, chances are most if not all of your designated threat team are occupied for the long weekend. 

Between the lack of IT staffing and your law firm's network turning into a ghost town for the weekend, hackers know that no one is likely to notice their infiltration until it's too late. So, like a thief in the night, they sneak in just between your third hot dog and the fireworks finale, and your team is none the wiser until Monday morning-- if you're lucky enough to catch them right away. 

Even if you do run a Security Operations Center-- or SOC-- in-house, chances are your coverage is greatly reduced if you are among the 78% who reduce staffing by half or more on holidays and weekends... or the 6% of SOC organizations who don't monitor at all outside of business hours (Cyber Insurance News).

#2: Working hard or hardly working? Your attention is split even when you're online. 

This statistic may sound shocking... but is it really?

In a 2021 study, a sizable 70% of professionals stated that they responded to a threat while intoxicated during off-hours.

Suffice to say, long weekends aren't known as times of laser-focus and discernment. In fact, even if you're able to reach your security team during their time off, there's no saying how equipped they'll be to respond to security threats. 

Factor in holiday travel, including Wifi-less plane rides and long car rides to vacation destinations, and you may find that even your most dedicated cyber defense team members can't do much of anything to defend against a threat. 

If your law firm works with an IT partner or MSP, they likely have a dedicated staff working throughout office closures. That means that in an emergency, even if regular ticket service is suspended until Monday morning, a team is monitoring your network and responding to threats.

However, make sure your partner is a proactive one-- they should be reaching out to your team if anything suspicious comes into play, not relying on your team to notice and report incidents first. Otherwise, cyber threats might still get lost in the festivities. 

#3: Bad actors want to give you a holiday gift... or not.

Chances are, your law firm is dedicated to providing a culture of appreciation, and part of that means occasional perks. Around the holiday season, employee appreciation gifts may not be expected, but they're usually not questioned, either. 

An employee may receive an email with a message of gratitude and a simple link to claim a gift card for Amazon. Excited to purchase some sparklers and a brand new pool float, they click to claim... and your organization is loaded, immediately, with ransomware. There's no worse way to interrupt a party. 

Hackers leverage your team's goodwill to craft effective and realistic phishing schemes relating to employee appreciation. In fact, just last summer, it was revealed that a cybercrime group had realistically impersonated a popular and legitimate employee appreciation program, AwardCo, to systematically scam employees whose organizations actually used the platform.

Using AI, hackers have even higher chances of crafting compelling phishing schemes-- and using holiday festivities to make them even more convincing.

#4: Remote work login or attack in action?

For many busy law firm employees, including attorneys with looming deadlines, long weekends and holidays tend to include at least a little bit of work.

As your team embarks on vacations, family visits, and more, new locations and devices may pop up on your radar and subsequently be written off as a remote worker logging in from outside of the office. 

Hackers know this, and it's surprisingly easy to spoof a location. For example, one of your attorneys may have posted on LinkedIn last week about how much she's looking forward to visiting Cape Cod for the holiday. A hacker monitoring her social media makes a note. Then, on Independence Day, when her email login pings a few different times from Cape Cod, it's assumed that it's really her catching up on some emails.

In reality, she left her work phone at home-- and a hacker finally executed their plan to use her stolen login credentials, leaving you none the wiser to their VPN location tactic. 

This is why it's critical to take the following precautions when working remotely:

• Separate work and personal devices (and logins!) to prevent hackers from breaching your law firm's network 
• Register all devices that are being used remotely and the expected locations that they will be pinging from
• Set up MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) to further prevent impersonations and hacks 
• Create and mandate a process for reporting lost or stolen devices immediately-- and make sure your security stack includes the right tools to shut them down and wipe them remotely 

Make it harder for hackers to take advantage of your time off by keeping these best practices current and well-enforced. 

What can you do to protect your law firm this holiday weekend?

Law firms should take a holistic look at their security solutions and staff, and determine answers to the following questions:

• Who is responsible for monitoring and responding to cyber threats when we're closed for the weekend?
• Will key staff members be available in case of emergencies, and do we have their up-to-date contact information?
• Do we have an Incident Response plan in place, and does it dictate roles and responsibilities clearly?
• Have we practiced our Incident Response plan recently enough to execute it in an emergency?
• Have we provided mandatory phishing training and warned staff of the uptick in holiday phishing attempts?
• Is anyone working remotely and how can we validate suspicious logins?
  
  

If any of these answers are unsatisfactory, now is the time to act. Make sure you've addressed as many of these security concerns as you can before the weekend, and be sure to continue following best practices-- reporting lost or stolen devices, carefully vetting emails and phone calls, logging out of programs when you're finished using them, and ensuring security monitoring continues off-hours.

Though many of these items take time to truly rectify, you can start now. Any positive security action you take today can protect you tomorrow, and your cybersecurity journey starts with small steps. 

A little peace of mind goes a long way in creating a relaxing and exciting holiday weekend... so set yourself up to worry only about whether to add ketchup, mustard, or both to that hot dog, not about hackers slipping in under your nose. 

The SafeST Partner for Law Firms

As a SOC 2 Type II compliant organization for 6 years in a row, Strategic Technology Solutions has provided hundreds of law firms with the security services they need to rest easy every day of the year- even over long weekends and holidays.

Book a call today or learn more about our security services exclusively designed for law firms.