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COMMENT FROM TREY FORD, GLOBAL SECURITY STRATEGIST, RAPID7.
Published by Gbaf News
Posted on December 1, 2015
2 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Gbaf News
Posted on December 1, 2015
2 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
As we enter the Christmas shopping season, many retail organisations go into a “production freeze” where they halt updates and configuration changes in their payment and order fulfillment systems to limit the risk of interruption and slowdowns to mission critical systems. IT teams and security folks are scrambling to test and lock in configurations, verify controls, and plead to their respective deities that systems perform exactly as intended during the shopping rush.
This creates a particularly interesting situation: there will be very little in the way of updates to those systems over the next 90 days. Any steps to prevent an incident – that would make an organisation a harder (or more expensive) target for criminals — are now on hold until after the holiday rush.
Think of this in terms of the security lifecycle: Prevent, Detect, Correct – it’s also a good way to simplify the NIST cyber security framework1,2 from this point forward, energy investment should shift from prevent, to detect and correct.
Attackers already inside an organisation will stay quiet until the time is right, as they will see more credit cards in the next couple of weeks than the next six months combined.
How organisations can prepare for the days ahead
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