Black Friday cybersecurity: How to get endpoint protection right in 2025

There’s a common belief that the phrase “Black Friday” comes from black (as in ink), since the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S. has, for decades, marked a point when retailers turn deficit into profit and therefore, red ink into black.

But the true origin story of Black Friday is not so positive, and the day itself has become difficult and dangerous in the 21st century. Police in Philadelphia probably coined the modern phrase “Black Friday” in the 1950s, referring to the arduous amount of overtime they had to put in to control massive crowds of shoppers descending on the city. One of the major challenges they faced was preventing shoplifting.

In 2025, the shoppers are still there, and so is the shoplifting — but in a different paradigm. A major chunk of holiday retail commerce has moved online, and Black Friday now is more of a season than a single day. As a result, the bellwether period for retail has become increasingly challenging for businesses and managed service providers (MSPs) trying to maintain order during surges in ransomware, fraud and other cyberattacks.

Black Friday is a prime example of why endpoint protection and network monitoring are so critical. Just as users don’t seem to have learned all that much from Cybersecurity Awareness Month, consumers continue to take cybersecurity risks on Black Friday, putting data and organizations in peril.

Black Friday and post-Thanksgiving in general have long been a dangerous season for cybersecurity, and it remains a high-risk period for a few primary reasons.

First of all, cyberattacks really do ramp up from late November through late December, and for good reason. Harried bargain hunters make great potential victims for cyberattackers. TransUnion found that suspected digital fraud attempts increased by 4.4% in the U.S. and by a shocking 83% in Mexico during the 2024 holiday season compared to the rest of the year. Colombia, Guatemala and Puerto Rico also experienced increases in fraud of more than 25% during the holidays in 2024.

But the root of the problem is really consumer behavior. Rather than being more careful about clicking on unsolicited emails, consumers can have their heads turned by what appear to be great offers. And there are plenty of emails to open, with sends up by more than 20% in the 2024 holiday period compared to 2023. Many eager users set themselves up for classic and fairly simple cyberattacks, such as signing up for a mailing list, answering a survey or liking a post on social media.

The frenzy of holiday shopping might be a little easier for MSPs and IT professionals to manage if users just browsed on one laptop or phone. But they don’t. In fact, the number of endpoints employees use at work at any time of year is increasing.

It’s no secret that, like most of us, users in your or your clients’ organizations definitely shop at work, and they’re using a lot of caution while doing it. Between malware potentially jumping from a home network to a business network via a rogue device or a user simply introducing malware into a network you manage, the risk of a data breach during the holiday shopping season is extremely high.

One effective way IT professionals and MSPs can fight cyberattacks during the Black Friday season is by implementing endpoint detection and response (EDR). MSPs also have the opportunity to add extended detection and response (XDR) for clients.

After all, as IBM notes, almost all cyberattacks and most successful data breaches begin at an endpoint. Add to that the fact that, once again according to the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, about 60% of data breaches involve an end-user mistake, and the importance of endpoint protection becomes crystal clear.

But managing endpoint protection while also trying to wrangle with other cybersecurity applications can be both difficult and costly. What organizations need is a solution that integrates endpoint and network protection into a single platform. Cutting the number of tools down is good for both cost and manageability; cutting it to one is much better. And if that solution can include much more than just EDR and XDR, that’s a major bonus.

That’s exactly what Acronis Cyber Protect and Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud deliver. Acronis Cyber Protect offers integrated endpoint management that enables IT teams to manage and secure endpoints with a single agent and unified console for asset discovery, vulnerability patching, remote monitoring and automated task execution via scripts. The platform also features solutions that deliver integrated backup, disaster recovery and email archiving.

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud gives MSPs a consolidated, comprehensive and natively integrated platform that includes endpoint protection, network monitoring and much more. Acronis delivers a consolidated set of solutions that offer backup and email archive capabilities, security for email and collaboration applications, security posture management, and even a new approach to security awareness training. Of course, it also offers both EDR and XDR to protect endpoints during even the busiest season.

This Black Friday season and complications that surround it will likely become more difficult for MSPs to manage year after year, as there is little evidence that consumers are moving toward more cautious behavior. In fact, the opposite is true. EDR is essential for IT professionals, and EDR and XDR are both critical functions for MSPs during the holiday season. Acronis Cyber Protect and Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud deliver the power and simplicity IT pros and MSPs need with a natively integrated, comprehensive cybersecurity platforms.