Cyber-Criminals Don’t Take the Holidays Off

It’s nearly upon us. Black Friday weekend… the beginning of the holiday shopping and party season that will generate an estimated $5.4 billion windfall for cyber-criminals!

This holiday season we decided it would be fun to create an infographic that illustrated the relationship between holiday spending, payment card transactions, online, offline and mobile commerce, cyber-crime and remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

Over the next month you’re likely to hear Andy Williams singing, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” This may be especially true for retailers in many parts of the world, who take in 20-50% of their annual revenues between now and New Year’s Eve.

In the US alone, it’s estimated that 255 million people will get out and shop over Black Friday weekend, spending an estimated $64 billion. Over 60% of this spending will be done on payment cards. With retailers and other enterprises operating in production freeze between now and sometime in early January, patching backlogs are bound to occur. And based on last year’s holiday-season counts of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe you might think, “It’s the most vulnerable time of the year.”

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Check out the infographic and let us know what you think.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Tenable Network Security!