The Timing Isn’t an Accident
Every year, right around the point when Massachusetts businesses start eyeing Black Friday sales and year end deadlines, something else picks up speed too: email based fraud aimed at the people who approve payments. Darktrace tracked a 692 percent jump in phishing volume during the run up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and McAfee Labs found holiday themed phishing emails rose nearly 500 percent between October and early November. The pattern isn’t subtle. Attackers know finance teams are busy, vendors are sending more invoices than usual, and a slightly odd email is easy to wave through when everyone’s trying to close out the quarter.
What’s Actually Landing in Inboxes
Most of what gets through doesn’t look like a crude scam anymore. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported close to 8.5 billion dollars in business email compromise losses across the last three years, with 2024 alone accounting for roughly 2.8 billion of that. These aren’t Nigerian prince emails, there’s a reason that joke feels dated now. A well run business email compromise attempt mimics a real vendor’s invoice format, references an actual project, and asks for a payment method change that sounds completely routine. The average incident costs an organization around 126,000 dollars, and plenty of small and mid sized businesses never fully recover the funds once they’re gone.
Ransomware timing follows a similar pattern. Security firm Semperis found that 86 percent of ransomware victims were hit on a weekend or a holiday, when IT staffing is thinnest and response time is slowest. Combine that with average ransom demands now topping 250,000 dollars, and the cost of being short staffed during exactly the weeks when attackers are most active gets hard to ignore.
Where Massachusetts Businesses Get Exposed
A few patterns show up again and again in the weeks leading into the holidays:
- Finance staff receiving a “vendor” email requesting a change to bank details on file, timed to land right before a scheduled payment run.
- Employees clicking shipping notification or order confirmation links on personal devices connected to company email, especially during a season when everyone’s expecting packages.
- Help desk tickets that quietly pile up because the team is short staffed around the holidays, letting a real compromise sit unnoticed for days.
None of this requires a sophisticated attacker, it just requires volume, patience, and a workforce that’s distracted. That’s exactly what the holiday season provides, free of charge.
What Actually Helps
The fix isn’t a lecture about “being careful.” It’s a short list of things that make the scam harder to pull off regardless of how convincing the email looks. Verify any payment detail change by phone, using a number already on file, never one pulled from the email itself. Make sure multi factor authentication covers email and finance systems specifically, not just the network login screen employees see each morning. And keep your security stack running strong year round rather than tightening it up only after something goes wrong, since most of what actually stops phishing and business email compromise is monitoring that’s already in place before the seasonal surge hits.
If something does look off, the fastest fix is usually the simplest one: get it in front of someone who can check it immediately instead of letting it sit in an inbox overnight hoping it resolves itself. A team that knows to loop in help desk support the moment an email feels wrong will catch far more than one that’s just told to “use good judgment” and left to sort it out alone.
The Window Is Open Now
By the time Black Friday actually arrives, the attackers testing your defenses will have already moved on to whoever’s left exposed. The weeks before the surge, right now, are when a quick review of email controls, payment verification steps, and holiday staffing coverage actually pays off. Waiting until the invoices start looking suspicious means reacting instead of being ready, and reacting is always the more expensive option.
Schedule a free security assessment with Cloud9 and get a clear picture of where your business stands before the holiday scam volume hits its peak.