Christmas cyber risk is real – as the festive lights go up and workplaces start winding down for the holidays, many UK organisations relax their guard. The festive season, from Black Friday and Cyber Monday through to the New Year, has become a favourite window for cyber-criminals. When internal IT and security coverage thins or isn’t consistently maintained, attackers see an open invitation.
With staff on holiday or running skeleton IT rotas, what may start as a minor alert – a phishing message, unusual login or weak spot – can balloon overnight into a serious breach, often without detection until systems are compromised or data exfiltrated.
Why Christmas and the holiday season are prime time for cyber-crime in the UK
A marked increase in festive-season cyber crime
- According to figures linked to online shopping and fraud around the holidays, UK consumers lost more than £11.5 million to festive-season scams during November 2023–January 2024 – with many attacks exploiting the rush and lowered vigilance of the period.
- Broader industry reports suggest a 30–40% increase in cyber-attack attempts during festive and public-holiday periods, as threat actors side-step well-covered working weeks in favour of weaker defences.
- Formal surveys from UK government sources note that roughly half of businesses report a breach or attempted attack within a 12-month period – breaches that can easily coincide with holiday seasons, amplifying impact when staffing is low.
Many organisations reduce their internal security coverage
Despite the increased risk, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not employ continuous security monitoring – only around a third report using monitoring tools, rising to roughly two-thirds among mid-sized companies. That leaves a significant portion of businesses exposed when vigilance matters most.
During festive leave periods or reduced-staff rotas, teams may fail to review logs, overlook suspicious activity, and ignore alerts.
Social engineering, scams and human-factor risks spike
Holiday-themed scams – fake delivery notifications, phony “too good to be true” deals, impersonation of retailers or charities – proliferate during Christmas. Attackers exploit the sense of urgency, increased online shopping and relaxed personal vigilance. Employees accessing corporate systems from personal devices, responding to late-night emails or acting under seasonal pressure (e.g. final orders, urgent shipping), further increase risk.
What’s at stake: the real cost of a holiday-period breach
A cyber-incident during the festive season can inflict multiple layers of harm:
- Operational disruption – downtime, delayed orders, failed deliveries, frustrated customers – exactly when business is busiest.
- Financial loss – direct costs of remediation, potential regulatory fines, and indirect costs such as lost sales or reputational damage.
- Repeat risk – many UK firms experiencing a breach report multiple incidents in a year, not a one-off.
- Long-term reputational damage – customers’ trust can be harder to regain when security fails during a season of goodwill.
In a high-stakes season like Christmas, even a short outage or data incident can cause disproportionate damage to revenue, customer confidence and brand reputation.
How a 24/7 SOC restores resilience – even when your team is offline
A robust, always-on Security Operations Centre (SOC) fills the gap many organisations accept during holidays, offering continuous, professional monitoring and rapid response – including over Christmas and New Year.
Continuous monitoring & early warning
- SOCs aggregate logs and telemetry from endpoints, cloud platforms, identity systems, network devices and applications – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
- The SOC identifies and prioritises suspicious events immediately, rather than deferring them until the next business day
Advanced detection, correlation & threat hunting
- Through threat intelligence, behavioural analysis, and automated detection, SOCs can spot subtle indicators of compromise that may evade basic defences – especially valuable during off-hours or when staffing is sparse.
- Alerts are triaged and enriched via automation so that only relevant, high-confidence incidents require human review, reducing alert fatigue and improving response quality.
Rapid incident response with pre-defined playbooks
- When a credible threat is detected – such as ransomware deployment or unauthorised access – containment steps (isolating hosts, revoking credentials, blocking malicious domains/IPs) can be taken immediately, regardless of holidays or weekends.
- Coordination with internal teams (IT, compliance, management) or external services (vendors, insurers) proceeds seamlessly, avoiding delays common with ad-hoc on-call rotas.
“Follow-the-sun” model ensures global resilience
- For UK-based businesses, leveraging a globally-operated SOC means coverage is maintained even when local teams are off – essential when bank holidays, weekends and time zones overlap.
- This approach prevents burnout, ensures consistent quality of monitoring, and avoids reliance on individuals being available at unsociable hours.
How to get holiday-ready: practical steps for UK businesses
Ahead of the next festive season, follow this checklist to strengthen your defences:
- Audit your seasonal risk windows – mark peak periods (Black Friday, Christmas rush, supplier shutdowns, maintenance windows) when traffic and transactions are high, but internal staffing may be low.
- Define your minimum coverage & SLA expectations – for example, alert triage within 15 minutes, containment within an hour, and clear escalation paths 24/7 over holiday periods.
- Ensure full visibility into critical systems – gather logs from cloud platforms, identity/authentication services, endpoints, network devices and business-critical applications.
- Enforce strong identity and access controls before peak periods – implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), apply least-privilege access, audit privileged accounts, and finalise joiner/mover/leaver processes.
- Simulate a holiday-period breach scenario – run a tabletop exercise assuming half your internal team is on leave, and test hand-off to your SOC provider under realistic conditions.
- Educate employees on festive scams and social engineering – highlight risks such as fake delivery notices, fake last-minute offers, urgent-payment requests and charity scams; reinforce verification best-practices.
Why 24/7 Managed SOC from Bitdefender is the smart move
Most UK organisations simply don’t have the scale to run a full, around-the-clock SOC in-house. That’s where Bitdefender’s 24/7 Managed SOC delivers real value: you get a specialist security team watching your environment continuously – even when your own staff are enjoying Christmas with their families.
With Bitdefender’s global “follow-the-sun” operations, specialist teams continuously apply advanced threat detection, expert triage and rapid response. Alerts are investigated within minutes, not hours. The SOC team can instantly isolate hosts, lock down credentials or block malicious domains – before an attacker has the chance to escalate.
The result? Confidence. You can trade, ship and support customers through the festive rush knowing that if anything suspicious sparks up at 2am on Boxing Day – someone capable is already handling it.
Bringing it all together
The festive season should be a time for celebration – not worry. But with historical trends and attacker behaviour showing a clear increase in holiday-period cyber threats, any business taking Christmas downtime lightly risks serious exposure. When internal teams wind down, attackers ramp up.
A well-managed, 24/7 SOC doesn’t just plug a temporary gap – it turns seasonal vulnerability into sustainable resilience. With constant monitoring, rapid detection, expert triage and automated containment, you can trade, ship and operate through Christmas with confidence.
Because when the office is dark, someone should still be watching.
Get in touch with us today to find out how our affordable, enterprise-level Bitdefender’s 24/7 Managed SOC can keep your business protected throughout the festive season and beyond.
Reference sources
- UK Government / Action Fraud – Festive Period Online Shopping and Fraud Reports
- National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – Cyber Threat Trends and Seasonal Risk Advisories
- Experian – UK Fraud Trends at Christmas / Festive Period Fraud Analysis
- TransUnion UK – Holiday Season Fraud and Cyber Risk Trends Report
- UK Finance – Fraud The Facts: Purchase Scams and Online Fraud
- Citizens Advice – Scams and Consumer Fraud Annual Report
- Cifas – State of Scams in the UK Report
- TechRepublic (citing UK Government data) – Black Friday and Christmas Online Scam Analysis
