What are the best practices for reducing employee-driven cyber risk during remote work and holiday periods?

Why remote work and holidays raise employee-driven cyber risk

Remote work expands the number of places and devices where work happens, which makes it easier for routine mistakes to become security incidents. Holiday periods add distraction, travel, staffing gaps, and a higher willingness to work quickly. The main issue is not just weaker technical controls, but weaker judgment under pressure, which is where awareness and simple guardrails matter most.

That is why CISA cyber threat advisories remain useful context for employee risk: the same social engineering, credential theft, and ransomware patterns intensify when people are rushed or away from their normal environment.

Which employee behaviours create the most avoidable exposure?

The highest-risk behaviours are usually the most ordinary ones: reusing unsafe networks, moving work files into personal email or storage, approving requests too quickly, and treating removable media as harmless. Those actions can expose data, create malware entry points, or bypass normal visibility. The danger increases when employees are relaxed, multitasking, or trying to be helpful rather than careful.

Policy needs to be explicit about what is allowed, especially for work data, personal accounts, and public access points. One practical control is to make insecure sharing and unmanaged storage harder than approved collaboration channels.

Where insider misuse or careless exfiltration is a concern, NHIMG’s Insider Threat and Identity Guide is a useful companion because it connects employee behaviour to least privilege, leaver risk, and behavioural monitoring.

What controls actually reduce mistakes without slowing everyone down?

The best controls are the ones that reduce decision fatigue. Regular awareness training works when it is short, repeated, and tied to real scenarios such as phishing, travel Wi-Fi, public charging, and holiday urgency. Clear reporting paths matter because employees need to know exactly what to do when they click, lose a device, or send something to the wrong place.

Technical friction should support the policy: block or warn on forwarding work documents to personal email, restrict removable media where possible, and use secure remote access rather than allowing ad hoc workarounds. The point is not to stop work, but to make the safe path the easiest path.

For teams that want a broader incident lens, NHIMG’s The 52 NHI Breaches Report is relevant because it shows how weak controls, exposed credentials, and poor handling practices can turn routine access into breach conditions.

What should managers and security teams focus on before holiday and travel periods?

The right preparation is a short, targeted reset rather than a long campaign. Reissue the rules that change risk most, confirm that reporting is easy, and check that remote access, device protection, and content controls are working as expected. Teams should also remind employees that being away from the office does not reduce the need to verify requests, even when the request appears to come from a colleague or manager.

Security teams should watch for a spike in suspicious logins, unusual file-sharing, and requests to bypass normal process during peak travel or holiday windows. Those signals often tell you more than broad awareness metrics.

For operational backup, NCSC UK Advice and Guidance provides practical remote access and user guidance that aligns well with seasonal risk reduction.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Employee-driven cyber risk rises when human attention drops and routine controls are bypassed in the name of convenience. Remote work and holiday periods create exactly that condition, so the main threat is not a single sophisticated exploit, but a chain of small failures that can expose data, credentials, or access paths.

Failure mechanism: An employee accepts unsafe connectivity, forwards work material to a personal account, or ignores a suspicious prompt, which can enable credential theft, malware delivery, or unauthorized data movement.

Impact: The result can be account compromise, data leakage, business email compromise, or an incident that spreads because the initial mistake was treated as low severity.

Practitioner Guidance

What to prioritise: Focus first on the few behaviours that create the most loss if they go wrong, especially email forwarding, public network use, removable media, and fast approval of suspicious requests. Those are the habits most likely to turn a distracted moment into a reportable incident.

What to verify: Check that employees know the exact reporting channel and that the organisation can quickly disable unsafe sharing paths, remote access exceptions, or risky device use during peak holiday periods. If the control exists but staff cannot find it in minutes, it will not help when pressure is high.

Common mistake: Treating awareness as a once-a-year reminder. The better pattern is short refreshers tied to travel and leave windows, because the risk is behavioural and time-sensitive, not abstract.

Practitioner takeaway: Reduce employee-driven cyber risk by removing easy mistakes, not by expecting perfect vigilance. The most resilient programs make secure behaviour the default when attention is at its weakest.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• What are the best practices for reducing cyber attack risk across people, process, and technology?
• What are the best practices for reducing cyber risk through identity and access controls?
• Which access control practices matter most for reducing cyber insurance and governance risk?
• What are the best practices for reducing alert fatigue in a SIEM-driven SOC?