Holiday Security Precautions
The holidays are often hectic and filled with family plans, shopping and trips or vacations. During the holidays many people let their guard down as it is a magical time of year. But predators do not take time off
The following are ways we can help protect our homes when we are away on the holidays.
Holiday safety Precaution for Homes
you are away having a nice time
Safety Measures for Retail outlets
The Holidays are always synonymous with lots of shopping such as, Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday and other forms of last-minute holiday shopping for Christmas gifts and presents. This shopping behaviour leads to more transactions and more credit card spending. If you don’t have any idea of how big the holiday shopping is, just know that sales from the holiday months account for a whopping 19. 7% of annual retail spending in the United States. That is very huge, and criminals always want to take advantage of this heavy cash flow.
While the holiday shopping period is a very lucrative business period for business, criminals also consider it lucrative enough to carry out their activities. As they exploit the weakness and lapses caused by heavy cash spending, staff going on holiday vacation and heavy human presence to strike. Poor safety habits combined with last minute shopping chaos creates more avenues and opportunities for these criminals to operate. The following are some security measures retail outlets engage in during the holiday season:
Before the start of the holidays, it is important to get a security expert to conduct a risk assessment of the business. This helps identify the loopholes of the organisation's security structure. Security risk assessment helps point out grey areas in the business and recommend improvements that can be done to reduce these risks.
It is important to update the security system to be able to handle the holiday shopping. Update the outdated security equipment and make necessary adjustments where necessary. Also choosing the right system for your outlet that best suits it.
Individuals planning on shoplifting and other petty crimes might have visited the store in the past with intentions of casing and mapping the outlet to make it much easier for them to implement their agenda. By making either major or minor changes to the store outlets, would throw the invaders of their game as they were not prepared for the new arrangement.
Safety Precaution for Organizations
We all look forward to the holiday's, the laughter, the smiles and the amazing decorations. The holidays are always full of fun and the warmth of friends and family despite the snowy weather. In all this fun, the holiday season might not be all fun for many business, IT and security leaders as they are overwhelmed with last minute workloads, understaffed offices and most importantly focused on ending the year on a more profitable note.
Being overwhelmed with extra workloads and less staff strength may leave organizations unprepared to protect their businesses from emerging security challenges that the holidays bring. Criminals know that so many businesses are overwhelmed during this period and want to take advantage of it. Both cybercrime and physical crime are on the rise during the holiday period. The following are ways to protect your business during this period.
Have a Plan: Why most people have a plan in their head, they never develop the plan into the implementation stage. It is important to have a plan as a response for any attack during the holidays. The plan is laid out in response to any issue that might arise, from shortage of staff, to cyber-attacks and physical attacks.
Audit your systems: Having an audit of all your systems might prove helpful as an audit helps point out systems that might be vulnerable and these systems are easily targets for exploitation by these criminals.
Update Employee on common forms of attacks: It is also important to always update staff members on various methods of attacks especially cyber-attacks. Staff should understand how this attack works and avoid deceptive packages and it is important to get the IT and security departments to vet suspicious emails and messages.
Diversify financial accounts: It is important to distribute the organizations finances into various accounts. This helps protect the organization's finances in the cases of a compromise on one of the accounts. when an account is compromised, it might take a while for the financial institutions to act on it during the holidays, that is why it is important to diversify the funds.
Be Observant and security conscious: It is important to observe the physical surroundings and report any suspicious individuals lurking around to the relevant agencies. Also it is also important to be cautious of mails during the holidays. Also always get the IT team to vet suspicious emails.
By James Kimmel, Director of Operations
Strategic Security Corp.