Summer is here, out-of-office replies are enabled, and besides those looking forward to vacation, there’s one group that’s especially happy: cybercriminals. While half the workforce is at the pool, the other half is working from home or covering for colleagues, and it’s precisely this state of stress, distraction, and vacation planning that provides the perfect breeding ground for phishing emails to thrive.
Why the Holiday Season Is So Critical
It’s no coincidence that security incidents increase during the summer months and around holidays. This is because four factors come into play:
It is therefore advisable to limit the content of out-of-office replies to what is absolutely necessary and, whenever possible, to avoid disclosing internal details such as the names of substitutes or contact information to external parties by default.
New Forms of Spam and Phishing
Classic cyberattacks remain a popular tool for criminals. During vacation and holiday seasons, however, they are often adapted:
Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Fake requests from company executives, often marked as urgent (“Please transfer the funds immediately; I’m currently on the road”), a classic tactic that works particularly well during the holiday season because it’s harder to follow up with questions.
Fake Invoices and Payment Requests
Often featuring slightly altered sender addresses that are barely noticeable at first glance
Credential Phishing
Fake login pages designed to steal login credentials, often disguised as supposed IT notifications (“Your inbox is full,” “Your password is about to expire”).
QR Code Phishing (“Quishing”)
A trend that’s becoming increasingly common because traditional link scanners reach their limits more quickly when dealing with images in attachments.
These tools are increasingly supported by generative AI: spelling errors, once the most reliable warning sign, are becoming less common. The emails appear more professional and personalized, and are harder to spot at first glance.
Technical safeguards are crucial
Awareness training is useful and remains an important component; nevertheless, it’s risky, especially in the summer, to rely solely on employees’ vigilance. When people are in vacation mode, they click faster than they realize. That’s why a technical solution is needed that intervenes before a dangerous email even reaches the inbox.
This is exactly where a Secure Email Gateway comes in: It centrally scans incoming and outgoing emails before they reach or leave the corporate network, regardless of whether the recipient is currently in the office, working from home, or on vacation.
One key component of this is the analysis of attachments in an isolated environment, known as sandboxing. Suspicious files such as purported invoices or booking confirmations in PDF or Office format, which tend to appear more frequently during vacation season are first opened in a quarantined environment and checked for malicious behavior before they even reach the employee’s inbox. This allows malicious code that only activates when the file is opened to be detected without posing a risk to the actual inbox on the client’s device.
Gateway-Based Encryption Provides Protection
One aspect that is often overlooked in discussions about spam and phishing is encryption, even though it plays a crucial role in protecting sensitive communications. With gateway-based encryption, individual employees do not need to install, configure, or maintain their own encryption software, as the central gateway handles this for the entire organization. Emails are encrypted as they leave the company according to predefined rules, for example, when certain keywords, recipients, or attachments are involved.
This offers significant advantages, especially during the vacation season: It no longer matters whether the colleague from Human Resources, caught up in the stress of covering for someone on vacation, remembers to manually encrypt a sensitive pay stub or not. The rule takes effect automatically. Temporary replacements, part-time staff, or new team members during the vacation season do not need to be trained in complex encryption tools. Protection is ensured regardless of who is currently using the computer.
In other words: Gateway-based encryption relieves people of the responsibility to make the right decision at the critical moment, and that is precisely what makes it such an important advantage during the summer months.
Sender Authentication as an Additional Layer of Protection
In addition to encryption and attachment analysis, verifying the sender’s identity plays an important role. The SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) standards specify which servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of a domain and how to handle emails that fail this verification.
An email that purports to come from a company’s own management or a known business partner but was actually sent via an unauthorized server can be detected and rejected at the gateway. Since forged sender addresses play a central role in BEC and invoice fraud attempts which are particularly common during the holiday season properly configured sender authentication is a useful complement to encryption and attachment analysis.
6 Tips for Secure Email Communication During the Holiday Season
Conclusion
Cybercriminals don’t take vacations; on the contrary, the holiday season is their peak season. Relying solely on employee vigilance poses a risk that can be significantly reduced through technical measures. A secure email gateway with integrated, automated encryption ensures that security doesn’t take a vacation, even when everyone else does.
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