Security professionals keep to office hours, bad actors love it
I’m not someone who favours censorship but I’m beginning to wonder if it might be a good idea to try and limit the use of the ‘C’ word in the technology industry. I mean, it almost feels as if you can’t click on a Web page or open an e-mail without seeing it somewhere.
I get that cyber security (yes, that’s the ‘C’ word I was thinking of) is important, critical even, but this may be partly because technology is more vulnerable than it ought to be. In an ideal world at least, because it can sometimes seem like every advance in technology is accompanied by a commensurate increase in security threats and vulnerabilities.
Most times when you see the “C’ word, it’s in close proximity to truly hair-raising statistics or reports about the risk of cyber attack. For example, the Arctic Wolf 2025 Security Operations Report finds that “despite unprecedented investment in cyber security, the pace and complexity of today’s threats continue to challenge even the most mature organisations”.
Think about that for a minute. “Unprecedented investment” is struggling to keep pace with threats. As Arctic Wolf puts it, attackers are moving faster, targeting new attack surfaces, and exploiting new vulnerabilities.
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, attackers are exploiting another feature of technology: the fact that it is vulnerable all the time because it is on all the time.
Employees and their bosses typically work five days a week. They don’t work every hour of every day and they also don’t usually work on weekends, although there are sectors where certain employees might do so. In other words, they have time to switch off from work.
But according to Arctic Wolf, hackers and attackers are resorting to a particularly dastardly tactic to try and increase their chances of success: launching attacks out of hours.
The company’s research notes that 51% of alerts recorded by security operations teams occurred after most employees had finished for the day. It also found that 15% of alerts take place on weekends.
As you can imagine, this is making life even harder for cyber security professionals who are being forced to deal with alerts after hours and having their weekends disrupted by alerts. Human beings can’t be always on.
Dan Schiappa, president, technology & services, Arctic Wolf, warned that the threat landscape “is defined by round-the-clock attacks that target identity, exploit timing, and drive alert fatigue, leaving defenders to navigate increasingly complex tactics”.
This can lead to cyber security professionals feeling tired and worn out. It can also force companies to employ more professionals to provide cover out of hours and at weekends. Making defence even more expensive.
I suppose the flip side of this is that the hackers and attackers have to keep unsociable hours too but that’s probably an easier assignment if they don’t have to work from 9 -5 at the same time.
It’s probably worth pointing out, however, that in the old analogue days when people wanted to rob a bank or steal important information from an organisation, they invariably waited to do so until night time or at the weekend as those were the times when most of the staff were off work.
So, in that respect, cybercrime might not appear that much different. Maybe what we’re learning from the Arctic Wolf report isn’t all that unusual after all. Criminals like to attack when their chances of success are highest. And that tends to coincide when the target is at its most vulnerable. Which brings us to a universal truth: it doesn’t matter whether you use the ‘C’ word or not, underneath it all, security is pretty much the same.
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