By Apu Pavithran, CEO and Founder, Hexnode

As retailers brace for a projected $1 trillion holiday season, the collective corporate gaze is fixed firmly on logistics and transaction volume. However, this rush creates a dangerous “Holiday Illusion”—a deceptive sense of security where the pursuit of revenue quietly takes precedence over risk management.

Nowhere is this trade-off more visible than in the rapid, unchecked expansion of the workforce to meet seasonal demands. In this rush, the digital safeguards governing these new identities rarely scale with the speed of hiring.

Meanwhile, attackers are actively waiting for this specific window. As the holiday season drives a natural spike in digital traffic, this influx of temporary workers provides the perfect noise for cybercriminals to hide within.

Is Rapid Onboarding a Security Trap?

The logistical feat of onboarding thousands of temporary employees in mere days often pushes IT teams to cut corners. With so little time, issuing secure, corporate-managed devices becomes a logistical bottleneck, and many organizations resort to the easiest option: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

The risk here hinges on the total opacity of these endpoints to the IT admins. When a temporary staff member utilizes a personal smartphone to access inventory databases or shift portals, they effectively bridge the gap between the public internet and the internal corporate network. 

This gap is worsened by the nature of the workforce itself. Seasonal hires are rarely trained to spot sophisticated social engineering attempts. As AI-powered phishing grows more targeted and realistic, these temporary identities become the ideal entry point for credential harvesting operations that circumvent traditional defenses.

Cybercriminals are quick to exploit this distraction, who time their campaigns to coincide with periods of high diversion during holidays. The evidence is stark: last year saw a 327% global leap in Christmas-themed phishing attacks as the season progressed, a clear signal that attackers are shifting from generic spam to highly contextualized seasonal traps. 

How Does the ‘Skeleton Crew’ Invite Attacks?

The danger of seasonal hires is magnified not just by who is accessing the network, but when they are doing it. Sophisticated threat actors possess a deep understanding of the retail operational calendar. They recognize that while the sales floor operates at maximum capacity, the IT and Security Operations Center (SOC) typically rotates onto a “skeleton crew” schedule to accommodate holiday leave.

The attackers target this period heavily. In fact, 86% of ransomware victims are struck during off-hours, weekends, or holidays. The objective is to maximize the lag between intrusion and response. When the SOC is understaffed, the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) inevitably lengthens, allowing subtle anomalies to evolve into full-scale encryption events before anyone raises the alarm.

Even on a normal day, cyber readiness is far from guaranteed. According to Hexnode’s survey, 42% of the supply chain industry acknowledge they are ill-equipped to withstand a cyberattack. And during holidays, when IT teams thin out, the margin for error effectively vanishes.

This creates a defensive vacuum that human vigilance alone cannot fill. It necessitates a fundamental shift toward systems that can enforce security autonomously, ensuring that the shield remains up even when the IT operators are absent.

How Can Retailers Secure Transient Staff?

Before retailers can solve this challenge, they must rethink how security is delivered during seasonal peaks. The goal is not to slow down hiring, but to strengthen the defenses around a workforce that changes faster than traditional security processes.

This begins with targeted education. Briefing new hires on holiday-specific phishing lures, from fake gift card requests to urgent inventory alerts, is a necessary first line of defense. From there, the next step must be to secure their devices. This requires pivoting to a security model that spans every endpoint accessing corporate data.

The first priority here is absolute visibility. For that, retailers must adopt a comprehensive approach to endpoint management that brings even the “shadow network” of unmanaged devices into the light.

In the context of personal devices, this oversight means effective segmentation. By utilizing BYOD containerization features, retailers can create an encrypted “bubble” on personal devices that keeps corporate data completely isolated from personal apps and malware. Crucially, this architecture respects user privacy: while IT admins gain full control over the corporate container, the rest of the device remains invisible to them.

Simultaneously, the email inbox requires rigid governance to combat the seasonal spike in phishing campaigns. By managing email configurations, retailers can set up corporate mail accounts to receive communications solely from authorized domains. Furthermore, standard encryption protocols can be enforced through these configurations so that even if the data is intercepted, attackers wouldn’t know what to make of it.

For corporate-owned devices issued to temporary staff, the defensive posture can be dialed a notch higher by automating critical updates—keeping vulnerabilities sealed without manual intervention.

Ideally, an endpoint management solution unifies these capabilities under a single console. This centralization provides the command structure needed to maintain total situational awareness, ensuring uniform security standards across the entire fleet. 

Consequently, a seasonal workforce need not be viewed as an unavoidable security liability, but as a manageable asset. By securing the endpoint and automating the defense, retailers can ensure the holiday season is defined by record sales, not by security incidents.

About author

Apu Pavithran is the founder and CEO of Hexnode, the award-winning Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platform. Hexnode helps businesses manage mobile, desktop and workplace IoT devices from a single place. Recognized in the IT management community as a consultant, speaker and thought leader, Apu has been a strong advocate for IT governance and Information security management. He also finds time from his busy schedule to contribute articles and insights on topics he strongly feels about.