Planes, Trains, and...Cybersecurity Risks?

By: Sean Smith, BBW- Senior Information Security Analyst

With the holiday season comes an increase in travel as many people are visiting family and friends. Christmas and New Year’s are some of the busiest travel times of the year. Unfortunately, malicious actors do not take holidays. They understand organizations are often short-staffed during this time and may have reduced monitoring and response coverage.

Most employees maintain access to company email, messaging platforms (Teams, Google Chat), and often travel with company laptops. Travelers can become targets to a multitude of different attacks looking to steal valuable information.

When traveling, be aware of common cybersecurity risks. Free public Wi-Fi networks at airports, cafés, and hotels can be impersonated by attackers using similar network names to steal data. Device theft also increases during travel. In addition, “juice jacking” occurs when public USB charging ports or cables are tampered with to steal data or install malicious software on devices when they are connected.

Some things to monitor while traveling on your devices can help determine if your devices have been tampered with your phone battery dies quicker than usual. Often malware is running in the background causing more usage than normal. Look for other signs such as spikes in your data usage, slower performance, app crashes that have not occurred before, unusual notifications, or account alerts you didn’t trigger.

When traveling try to avoid public Wi-Fi’s, utilize your own devices chargers, use strong pin numbers and passwords for personal and work accounts, company approved VPN’s, and device encryption. If your device is stolen or you believe it may have been tampered with, please contact your company’s security team for assistance. Staying alert and following safe travel cybersecurity practices can help reduce these risks.