The holiday season consistently brings a higher risk across SMB environments. Users are distracted, teams run with reduced staff, and attackers take advantage of the noise. MSPs know the pattern well. In fact, cyberattacks surge by 30% during the holiday season. Because attacker infrastructure is increasingly industrialised, the best way to keep clients stable through December is to tighten controls, prepare users, and remove the weak points hackers rely on.
Key Takeaways
- Cyber risk spikes during the holiday season requireMSPs to focus on prevention and stability.
- Clear, early guidance on seasonal phishing and simple verification steps significantly reduces user driven incidents.
- Preholiday stability checks help MSPs make sure that backups and alerting remain predictable
- Phishing simulations and targeted training expose real user behavior under pressure and highlight the highest risk areas.
Below are the five areas MSPs should focus on.
1. Share Security Pointers for the Holiday Period
Seasonal phishing plays on urgency, emotions, and high-volume messaging. MSPs who brief users early see fewer incidents later.
No Slack account needed.
How MSPs should prep clients
- Send a brief advisory that outlines the current scams, including shipping notices, charity scams, payroll scams, and executive impersonation.
- Give users a simple checklist for evaluating emails so they stop guessing and start verifying.
- Require a second channel check for anything involving payments, personal data, or credential resets.
- Share actual phishing samples (sanitized) that the MSP has blocked so users can build pattern recognition.
- Direct all users to forward suspicious messages to IT. Centralized review keeps filtering accurately.
These steps cut down on the impulsive clicks that drive most holiday incidents.
2. Run a Pre-Holiday Stability Check
Top MSPs use December as a moment to confirm that the client’s environment is stable, patched, and predictable before staffing levels drop. This isn’t about extra work; it’s about ensuring nothing unexpected surfaces at the worst possible time.
What the stability check includes
- Confirm critical systems and security tools are patched and up to date.
- Validate backups are recent, accessible, and tested.
- Ensure alerting rules are tuned so only meaningful signals bubble up during quieter periods.
- Review endpoint status to ensure full coverage with no gaps.
- Double-check that automated responses and playbooks are working as intended.
This positions the MSP as a proactive partner who keeps the client’s environment predictable heading into the new year.
3. Strengthen Security Awareness Training
Most SMB incidents come down to user decisions. MSPs need teams who can spot trouble without overthinking it.
Training elements that matter during the holidays
- Teach users how seasonal phishing works and what attackers are targeting.
- Reinforce how to check sender domains, link previews, and inconsistencies in tone or grammar.
- Cover social engineering tactics that rely on travel, year-end deadlines, and remote work.
- Use short training modules so employees retain what matters.
- Encourage users to escalate quickly rather than trying to self-diagnose suspicious messages.
Effective user training reduces incident volume and noise for MSP support teams.
4. Validate Incident Response Readiness
Simulations reveal how users behave under pressure, rather than how they perceive themselves to behave. This is the most accurate method for identifying risk areas within a client’s environment.
How MSPs should run effective simulations
- Deploy holiday-themed scenarios that mimic real-world attacks, such as shipping updates, HR notices, and charity prompts.
- Target high-risk groups such as finance, admin, or executives.
- Track both clicks and reporting behavior to measure actual readiness.
- Utilize Guardz templates to create simulations that align with the client’s industry and workflow.
Simulations provide MSPs with actionable data instead of relying on assumptions.
5. Use the Season to Reinforce Your Role as a Trusted Partner
The holidays are a great moment for MSPs to show clients they’re not just a service provider but a steady partner who keeps an eye on things even when operations slow down. A small, proactive touchpoint can reassure users that they’re supported without creating more work for anyone.
Ways MSPs can strengthen partnerships without adding burden
- Share a brief seasonal note reminding users that you’re available for clarity whenever something looks uncertain.
- Offer a reassuring update on overall security posture so users feel grounded rather than uncertain.
- Provide simple guidance on what to do if something seems unusual.
- Position these reminders as part of your ongoing care for their environment.
- Use the communication as an opportunity to reinforce trust and reliability.
This approach centers on trust, professionalism, and consistency, helping clients feel supported without creating the impression of extra work for anyone.
Guardz gives MSPs a practical way to tighten client security posture during the holiday spike by reducing alert noise, correlating signals across endpoints and email, and surfacing the issues that actually require engineer time. Instead of juggling a stack of disconnected tools or drowning in false positives, MSPs get unified detection, automated response workflows, and usable threat telemetry that makes it easier to spot misconfigurations, stale controls, and active phishing patterns before they turn into tickets. The platform also streamlines user training and phishing simulations so MSPs can shift end users from guesswork to reliable reporting. The result is a cleaner operational workflow that helps MSPs maintain stability and resilience across client environments when staffing is thin and seasonal attacks ramp up.
