Cybercriminals don’t take vacation — and they know when your team does. The FBI and CISA have specifically warned that attackers time major ransomware attacks to coincide with holidays and long weekends, precisely because network defenders and IT support are running at limited capacity. Summer vacation schedules create those same conditions for weeks at a time: slower detection, easier impersonation, and more time to move through your systems before anyone notices.

The only way to know if your incident response plan will actually work is to test it before a real attack forces you to find out. A tabletop exercise — a structured walkthrough where your team responds to a simulated cyberattack scenario — exposes the gaps, unclear roles, and outdated contact info that live inside every untested plan. Businesses that skip this step often discover their plan fails at the exact moment they need it most.

A cyber incident response plan (sometimes called an IRP) is a written playbook your business follows when something goes wrong — ransomware locks your files, an employee clicks a phishing link, a vendor gets breached and takes your data with them. It tells you who to call, what to shut down, what to document, and how to communicate with clients and staff.

Most business owners think about cybersecurity the wrong way. They picture it as a single moment — the day they buy the software, hire the IT guy, or sign off on the policy. Box checked. Done. Back to running the business.

January feels like a reset. Everyone’s fresh off the holidays, systems are being cleaned up, and new staff are coming on board. But behind the scenes, Q1 is one of the riskiest times of the year for cyber incidents—especially for small and mid-sized businesses here in Albuquerque.