The government issued a warning this week reminding people that threat actors are likely to attack when entities are short-staffed due to weekends or holidays.
Brett Callow posted an interesting graphic on Twitter that may help drive that point home:
“What did you do last weekend, Mrs Ransomware Criminal?”
“Oh, not much. I was busy working.” pic.twitter.com/bsvfWtndNR
— Brett Callow (@BrettCallow) September 2, 2021
[Image credit for above: The data in “Mondays” is from ID Ransomware, which is a project of Michael Gillespie. The annotations were added by Callow on behalf of Emsisoft.]
Callow called special attention to the increased risk for school districts who are first re-opening for the school year in many areas, noting that threat actors wait until schools are about to re-open or are first re-opening so that there is more devastation from their attack and more pressure on districts to pay ransom:
It’s quite likely that we’ll see the same back-to-school disruption described by @samsabin923 this year too as, in each of the last 2 years, the # of successful attacks on the education sector has spiked by as much as 1020% between Q2 and Q3. https://t.co/unx0mV3qAL pic.twitter.com/2tvPdQSe7R
— Brett Callow (@BrettCallow) August 9, 2021
So before you head out for the holiday weekend, have you at least ensured that you have a working offline backup in case everything goes south in a hurry?
Enjoy your holiday!