Extra vigilence on holiday’s phishing ransomware excursions for people with systems to to exploit human weaknesses.  Be careful is the bottom line.  CISA AND the FBI urge people to vigilent, ransomware and it’s promary attack vector are exploited more since the onset of the COVID crisis, and particularly at Holiday times like Labor Day. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have observed an increase in highly impactful ransomware attacks occurring on holidays and weekends—when offices are normally closed—in the United States, as recently as the Fourth of July holiday in 2021. The FBI and CISA do not currently have any specific threat reporting indicating a cyberattack will occur over the upcoming Labor Day holiday. However, the FBI and CISA are sharing the below information to provide awareness to be especially diligent in your network defense practices in the run up to holidays and weekends, based on recent actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and cyberattacks over holidays and weekends during the past few months. The FBI and CISA encourage all entities to examine their current cybersecurity posture and implement the recommended best practices and mitigations to manage the risk posed by all cyber threats, including ransomware.

Click here for a PDF copy of this report.

*Defense in depth is a military term. According to Wikipedia, Defense in depth is a military strategy that seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of an attacker, buying time and causing additional casualties by yielding space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_in_depth. The network sense a defense in depth strategy emphasizes people, hard systems and processes in keeping attacks at bay https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/support/defenseindepth.pdf.