The holidays are upon us, and thoughts turn to festivities, shopping, vacations and spending time with family. However while we might be away from our consoles, attackers could be banging away at our networks. Historically, holidays are an active time for attackers, so be on guard.

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To start, it's a good time to perform some fine-tuning on your monitoring systems and test that alerts are working properly. Also, with the holidays keeping the staff at your organization lighter than usual, it's a good time for a wardial audit of answering modems. Less people are likely to be impacted by the phones ringing while you hunt for modems, and you might just discover and deprive a useful back door to attackers. Modem attacks are still fairly common and often yield high access to network devices and information stores. Pay careful attention to routers and network gear that might be using modem connections for management or vendor support. These make likely targets for the wardialing attacker.

So, go ahead, enjoy the season. Spend time with your family and friends and celebrate all the reasons we work so hard throughout the year. Just keep in mind that attackers don't take a holiday break and they could be planning on delivering a holiday surprise of their own. Continued vigilance and attention to detail are the keys to making this holiday season an incident free one.