12 Tips for a Cyber Safe Holiday Season
1. Manage Your Passwords
It’s always a good idea to update and strengthen your passwords, especially before you switch off for the holidays!
Always use unique passwords for every account.
Use strong passwords - combinations of letters, numbers and symbols are best or use a long passphrase such as a sentence that has meaning for you.
If you’ve been alerted to a data compromise or spill which could affect your accounts, update your passwords immediately!
Use a password manager to make the process of randomly generating and updating passwords a breeze.
IT Strategic are expert Last Pass Implementation Specialists and can help your business set up and maintain best practice password management. Speak to us to get started.
2. Use Multifactor Authentication
Your IT defences are only as strong as your organisation’s weakest passwords.
When implemented across your business, adding additional layers of authentication can exponentially improve your protection from adversaries attempting to hack into your accounts, websites, networks or applications.
Multi-factor authentication is one of the recommended Essential Eight strategies to mitigate cyber security threats. If you’d like advice or support on implementing IT security for you business, get in touch today.
3. Back It Up!
Sadly, disaster can strike at any time and unless you already have a system in place, take this as your cue to back up your data today!
Ideally, you’d want to minimise your recovery time by automating the back-up of your critical data and applications. Furthermore, using both local and offsite backup services improves your contingencies if the worst should happen.
If you need back-up? We’re always here to help.
4. Upgrade to Next-Gen Antivirus
Traditional antivirus solutions are no longer enough to keep up with the thousands of new viruses and threats being detected every day.
Next-Gen Antivirus (NGAV) solutions offers significant advantages and protections to the signature-based Antivirus solutions that you might be familiar with. When coupled with Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and intelligent backup programs and processes, you’ll significantly strengthen your resistance, resilience and recovery time.
5 . Update your Software
If you’re like many busy workers, you’ve probably got a backlog of software updates to activate. So let’s not ignore those pesky little notifications any longer!
Operating System and Application updates are provided to patch critical exploits and vulnerabilities and can be scheduled to avoid downtime so you can keep working without interruption.
Need a managed IT service provider to keep you on top of it? Give us a call.
6. Set up Ransomware Protection
Ransomware is on the rise! With surveys showing as many as 69% of surveyed businesses being attacked in the last five years, bolstering security programs and processes will become action critical for your IT strategy.
Setting up anti-ransomware and Endpoint Detection and Response software can significantly enhance your chances of detecting exploits before they become major problems.
Need advice? Book a time to discuss an audit and IT security plan for 2026, today.
7. Sign Up for Cyber Security Training
Prevention is always going to be the most effective way to manage your cyber security.
Scammers are becoming more sophisticated, more ingenious and in some instances, highly targeted in their approach. You can equip yourself and your team with the fundamental awareness and knowledge to identify and handle potential threats safely.
Talk to us about initiating cyber security training for your organisation, today.
8. Stay Away from Unsecured Wifi
Public WiFi typically lacks encryption and requires no authentication making it a magnet for identity thieves and other malicious adversaries.
Through unsecured WiFi connections, hackers may be unknowingly intercepting your connection as it sends information to and from the WiFi router. Also be on the lookout for malicious hotspots posing as public WiFi - it’s a very simple but seductive trick.
If you must use Public Wi-Fi, avoid using it to login to any email, social media, private files or bank accounts - in fact anything that may contain sensitive information.
If you need help setting up secure WiFi for your organisation, let’s chat.
9. Look out for Look-a-like Sites
Look-a-like sites are often set up by cybercriminals to steal credentials and money, to sell counterfeits, to facilitate fraud, and to spread malware.
These sites are designed to be very convincing and the differences can be subtle. Common tell-tale signs such as a missing or mismatched SSL certificate, slight misspellings in the domain name and inaccuracies in the content, aren’t always noticeable to the untrained eye.
When in doubt, avoid clicking links you receive from websites, email or social media and perform your own searches to check for authenticity and official sites.
Look-alike sites also pose a threat for businesses. If you need help with look-alike domain monitoring - get in touch.
10. Check it out before you Checkout
The shopping season can be a confusing time consumers, opening up the perfect conditions for cybercriminals to commit fraud.
As a rule of thumb, if something appears too good to be real, chances are, it isn’t.
Here’s a quick checklist
Unusual URLs
Unbelievable offers and discounts
Content contains notable inaccuracies
Weird payment options
Unable to locate their ABN
Missing SSL certificate (no padlock icon in the URL bar)
11. Beware of Scams.
The holiday season is rampant with “phishing” and “smishing” scams, so be extra vigilant about any emails, SMS, social media posts, links, websites and invitations to download that you come across. Stay safe!
If you come across a scam, DO NOT CLICK on any of the links. You might want to consider marking the email as spam or blocking the sender altogether to remove the temptation in the future.
You can also report scams here: https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/report-a-scam.
Some of the most successful scams deploy simple, but effective social engineering techniques to unlock information. Want to train your teams on what to look out for? Let’s discuss cyber security training for your organisation in 2026.
12. Keep Personal Information Private.
People post a surprisiing amount of personal information on social media especially when they are on holidays and focused on having fun.
In the age of social media and live streaming, your content may inadvertently provide many clues and personal details and which criminals may use to engineer scams and fraud.
Before you post a photo, video or update, take a critical moment to check whether the content is public or private and adjust your settings accordingly.
Always be mindful about publicly posting details that might be answers to common password retrieval questions such as current or previous address details, birth dates, milestones, pet names, family members and children’s names.
Now might be a good time to review your social media accounts to ensure your details are as secure as they can be!