For Teams That Already Know the Basics
For Teams That Already Know the Basics
For many organizations, December means code freezes, holiday PTO, and hurried last-minute initiatives. For adversaries, it is peak season. Threat actors count on distraction, reduced staffing, and inconsistent change control. This year has shown a measurable rise in deceptive domains, credential theft, QR-based phishing, and attacks targeting identity systems. The real value of a year-end review is not in repeating standard advice but in tackling the activities that actually move the needle for mature teams.
This guide highlights practical, high-impact work that fits into tight schedules, provides artifacts you can reuse throughout next year, and gives your team something more interesting than another generic reminder email.
Run a Focused Holiday Threat Hunt
Skip the broad “scan everything” approach and run a short, hypothesis-driven hunt based on active seasonal threats. Work from current attacker behaviors: HR-themed phishing with QR codes, login pages on newly registered domains, session hijacking attempts, and gift-card fraud patterns. Pick a few targeted questions such as whether any authentications appear from new geographic locations immediately following QR-based logins. Keep the sprint to a couple of hours and capture a short summary documenting findings, rules tuned, and improvement opportunities. This document becomes part of next quarter’s tuning backlog.
Clean Up Identity in Places People Forget
Most teams perform standard access reviews, but the hidden risks live in the corners: long-lived OAuth tokens, abandoned third-party app consents, shared calendars that point to expired or compromised external domains, and integrations nobody remembers approving. Create a simple classification that sorts identities and apps into healthy or problematic. Anything unclear, unused, or over-privileged gets reduced in scope or removed. This exercise pays off quickly because modern attacks depend far more on identity abuse than perimeter weaknesses.
Test Backups Through Actual Restoration
A backup is only as good as its last successful restore, and destructive attacks continue to rise. Select one important system and perform an actual restoration into a clean environment. Time the process, verify the integrity of the restored data, and compare real performance to documented recovery objectives. Many organizations discover that their recovery times are nowhere close to what they assume. A single concrete restore test strengthens resilience far more than reading another ransomware advisory.
Conduct a Short Incident Response Scenario with Real Cross-Functional Pressure
Use a realistic holiday scenario such as a fraudulent HR email or a hijacked promotional domain. Include HR, finance, legal, and communications. Walk through who detects the issue, who freezes payments, who communicates to employees, and what happens if email cannot be trusted. These short exercises expose gaps that full-blown IR plans often obscure. Capture a handful of fixes and assign ownership before closing the session.
Prepare a Seasonal Threat Brief that Leadership Will Actually Read
Executives receive countless generic security updates during the holidays. Replace that with a concise two-page summary: one page outlining the specific threats most active this season and another detailing what your team is doing in response. Tie recommendations to concrete actions such as identity tightening, domain monitoring, or improvements to payment verification workflows. This transforms security into a proactive partner rather than a source of background noise.
Review the Effectiveness of Your Awareness Program Instead of Sending Another Reminder
Instead of pushing out another holiday phishing message, run a review of your awareness program’s actual impact. Evaluate which content changed behavior, where people still clicked, and whether reporting rates improved. Replace ineffective modules, double down on material that worked, and set measurable goals for next year such as reducing MFA fatigue approvals or improving reporting speed. Then send one short reminder focused only on threats that reliably surge in December: shipping scams, charity fraud, and HR-themed lures.
Tune Detection and Logging Using Real Data from the Year
Pull the top incident categories, actual response times, and categories of noisy alerts that never matter. Retire detections that produce no actionable results. Add or refine a small number of high-value rules aligned with current attacker techniques. Identify where logging gaps or missing telemetry slowed investigations and plan corrections for early next year. The objective is to start the new year with better signal and clearer visibility.
Use a Capture the Flag or CTF as a Team Skill Booster
A well-chosen Capture the Flag exercise develops practical capability far faster than most formal training. Instead of watching another slide deck, teams practice analysis, exploitation, troubleshooting, and pattern recognition under light pressure, the same skills they need during real incidents.
You can keep this lightweight by selecting a short challenge set and having participants compare approaches afterward. For teams wanting structure, consider participating in an established event or running a small cross-team competition that blends security, development, and IT staff.
Several high-quality options are available:
- SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2025 (https://2025.holidayhackchallenge.com/)
A polished, story-driven CTF with both beginner micro-challenges and deep technical paths across web exploitation, forensics, cloud, and escalation techniques. It works well as a one-day exercise or as a multi-week informal challenge. - Hack The Box CTF Events (https://ctf.hackthebox.com/events/upcoming)
HTB provides competitive, time-boxed CTFs aligned with modern attacker tradecraft, ideal for teams who want clear scoring, fresh challenge sets, and a more competitive environment. - Lost Rabbit Labs – Web Application CTF (https://ctf.lostrabbitlabs.com/)
A focused option for teams wanting to sharpen practical web-security intuition. It mirrors real vulnerability patterns and is flexible enough for a single-afternoon sprint or a deeper multi-team matchup.
Whichever path you choose, the value is the same: shared problem-solving, repeatable internal training material, and a noticeable increase in confidence.
Close the Year by Planning Targeted Testing for Next Year
If your review reveals uncertainties in detection, gaps in recovery capability, or areas where adversarial testing has lagged, schedule a penetration test or red-team engagement for early next year. A structured test validates assumptions, exposes weaknesses that routine operations miss, and establishes a measurable benchmark for improvement.
Final Thoughts
Effective year-end security work is not about checking boxes. It’s an opportunity to use the unique conditions of the season to expose blind spots, refine processes, and strengthen the pillars that matter most: identity, detection, and response. When done well, these efforts position your organization to enter the new year with clarity, confidence, and momentum.
Lost Rabbit Labs is committed to supporting organizations at every stage, whether you’re reinforcing foundational practices or pushing into advanced testing, program development, or strategic security initiatives. If your team needs a partner to help guide the next phase of your security maturity, we are ready to assist.
Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Lost Rabbit Labs!