3 Times Your Business Is Most Vulnerable
When your business is targeted by cyber criminals, it’s likely to be for a good reason. Online threats are often highly targeted, and put into motion by people who know exactly where the vulnerabilities lie, and who understand how to exploit them.
This often means getting the timing right. There are certain moments at which businesses are more vulnerable – and making the best use of those moments can be what keeps the average hacker in business.
This information is critical, too, for the businesses on the receiving end of would-be attacks. If you understand when you’re most likely to be vulnerable, you can take extra steps to protect yourself. In 2025, around a fifth of businesses in the UK were targeted – and so proactively protecting yourself might be critical.
Exploiting Weekends, Holidays, and Out-of-Hours Periods
When your specialised cybersecurity talent is not available, you’ll be slower to react to a breach – and in some cases, you might not be able to recognise it at all. For this reason, the times at which key staff are likely to be away are popular among cybercriminals. This means late on a Friday evening, when important staff won’t be back until Monday.
Christmas, Easter, and other major events might also be prime times for attacks, for much the same reason. Be sure that you have systems in place to monitor remote access, and to raise the alarm under certain conditions. Multiple failed logins and large amounts of traffic might indicate an attempt at a brute force attack.
Immediately Following Major System Changes or Patches
When your systems have recently changed, your staff might not yet have the expertise to deal with attacks. There might be teething problems and misconfigurations, which a hacker can exploit. It’s also worth remembering that even your in-house experts might not yet be up to speed with the new ways of doing things. Managed firewall services, which can react automatically to threats, can be very useful in this situation.
You’ll need to be sure that your antivirus and firewall software are functioning throughout the transition, and set up alerts so that you can investigate unforeseen lapses. It’s also worth paying attention to the way the system is operating. If things seem to be running slowly, then it might be because malware has been installed, and it’s clogging the CPU with background processes.
Hours After Successful Phishing or Credential Theft
Finally, we should consider the phishing scam. These often occur immediately after a member of your team has unwittingly opened the door: every moment of delay increases the likelihood that the victim will recognise the mistake and sound the alarm.
Your staff will need to be able to recognise the signs, and respond appropriately. Logins from new locations, spikes in email activity, and changes to financial data might all be traced back to a successful phishing attack.