Stay Safe This Holiday Season

The global Kaspersky Daily blog (blog.kaspersky.com) will be on recess from 24 December through 8 January. Between those two dates, you’ll find no new content on the global blog (except  New Years day, on which we have something special for you), though we encourage you to revisit any of our existing articles if you’d like to catch up.

The regional blogs (those that end in your specific top-level domain) may upload some region-specific stories during the break.

If you’re the type of person that celebrates the holidays – whether it’s Christmas or Kwanzaa or New Years or Hanukah (which totally already happened) or Festivus or anything else I may be overlooking – then we sincerely hope you enjoy those days. If you don’t celebrate the holidays, we hope you enjoy yourselves too.

Before you run off to all your holiday parties and other festive gatherings, be sure to check out our party survival guide infographic. It’s got all sorts of bright ideas about ways to protect the data on your various devices if they become lost or stolen. It even has a couple of humiliation prevention tips. If you do happen to lose your phone, which is apparently fairly commonplace during the holidays, here’s a rundown of how to remotely erase the data stored on it.

Also, take the time now to back everything up. As I’m writing this it’s 20 December and I’m pretty sure that almost no one is thinking about work at this point. We are deep, deep into the holiday lull, and from today, none of us will be at work at all. Take the five minutes, dust off that external hard-drive, and back-up the things you care about. Not necessarily because the holiday season calls for it, but because you probably have the time and the end of the year is as good a time as any.

As always, stay on alert for holiday scams. Cybercriminals love the holiday season. Real-world crooks must too, because not a year goes by where I don’t hear some story about someone’s house getting broken into and all their gifts getting stolen on Christmas Eve.

Beyond that, enjoy the holidays and check out our year in review and monthly news podcast.