Black Friday creates a shift that most enterprises feel long before the sale begins. Traffic climbs. Product teams release updates faster. New landing pages, offers, and integrations move into production with tight timelines. These changes are normal for revenue growth, but they also widen exposure in ways that are easy to miss when the focus is on performance and delivery.
Attackers know this pattern well. They increase their activity, prepare new tools, and organise their work around the same seasonal peak that businesses plan for. The goal is simple. Take advantage of short review cycles, temporary assets, and the pressure that comes with high-volume periods.
The rise in fraud during this season is not random. It grows from a system that becomes more active as demand increases. This blog examines how that system works and why enterprises see such sharp spikes in exposure during this time.
The Cybercrime Economy Behind Black Friday
Did you know that phishing activity jumped by 692 percent during Black Friday week in 2024?
Another striking figure is that over 38 million phishing attempts related to shopping were documented between January and November 2024. This marks a significant increase, nearly 25 percent higher than the number recorded in the preceding year.
Numbers like these are not random. They show how prepared attackers are for this season.
Criminal groups treat Black Friday like a business window. They register fake domains early, update their phishing kits, and rent out botnets long before the sale begins. In fact, Check Point found that 1 in every 11 newly registered Black Friday themed domains was malicious (Point Research, 2024).
This is like a supply chain. One group builds templates. Another manages stolen accounts. Someone else distributes the traffic. Everyone takes a piece of the profit.
And here is where it gets tricky for enterprises. When your teams launch new pages, open a payment API, or push quick updates for seasonal traffic, attackers expect it. High volume helps them blend in. Fast changes lower review time. Temporary assets often slip through normal checks.
So the surge you see during this season has a simple explanation. The attacker side gets busier at the exact moment your organisation is stretched.
How Attackers Monetize Black Friday Traffic
From your side, Black Friday looks like campaign calendars, capacity planning, and revenue dashboards. From the attacker side, it looks like a date circled in red.
They know three things will be true. Your systems will be busy. Your teams will be stretched. Your customers will be in a hurry. So they line up their playbook around that weekend and pull every lever that profits from noise and speed.
Let’s look at how that plays out in practice.
1. Phishing and Brand Spoofing When Everyone Expects Discounts
Black Friday trains customers to expect “too good to miss” offers. Attackers ride that behaviour.
They copy your branding, your tone, your usual email structure, and attach fake discounts or order issues. The goal is simple. Get people to click before they think. During a busy sale, that is exactly what happens.
On your side, support queues are already long. No one has time to check every suspicious email. So themed phishing and spoofed login pages quietly collect credentials, which then move straight into account takeovers and fraudulent purchases.
In other words, Black Friday gives them both a story and a crowd. They use both.
2. Credential Abuse Hidden Inside Normal Chaos
Login pages become some of the busiest parts of your stack. Customers reset passwords, log in from new devices, and hammer “retry” when things feel slow.
Attackers time credential stuffing for that exact moment. Failed logins no longer look suspicious. They look normal.
They reuse credentials stolen from older breaches, run them through automated tools that rotate IPs and mimic user habits, and watch for the small percentage that succeed. Those successful logins are immediately used to drain loyalty points, place fake orders, or sold on closed forums.
So from your SOC view, it looks like “heavy traffic”. From their view, it is a batch job quietly printing money.
3. Botnets Doing the Busy Work
Black Friday also changes who does the work. Attackers do not sit and click. They rent automation.
Botnets are used to:
- create fake accounts at scale
- hold and release carts to play with inventory
- scrape live prices and discount patterns
- hammer checkout flows faster than humans ever could
Because your genuine customer traffic is already high, this automated activity blends in. Your systems see traffic, not intent. The more your campaign succeeds, the easier it becomes for them to hide inside it.
4. Fraud as a Supply Chain, Not a Lone Attacker
The image of one hacker going after one website does not match Black Friday reality.
In practice:
- one group scans for exposed assets
- another group specialises in exploitation
- another handles stolen accounts and cards
- cash-out teams convert this into money and wash it through other channels
When your metrics show a spike in phishing, credential abuse, and payment fraud at the same time, you are not seeing three separate problems. You are seeing one network reacting to the same peak in your activity.
5. Why Black Friday Changes the Payoff
So yes, Black Friday changes things. Not because it invents new attack types, but because it changes three variables:
- How much your systems are doing
- How distracted your teams are
- How tolerant your customers are to “strange but urgent” messages
Higher volume means more places for small mistakes to hide. More pressure means more temporary fixes. More urgency means more people click before they think.
Attackers understand this cycle better than most boards do. They build their plans around the moments when your organisation is trying to move the fastest.
The Weakest Links: Where Organizations Actually Break
Seasonal peaks do not introduce new weaknesses. They reveal where existing controls fail under pressure. When teams accelerate releases, operate in parallel, and adopt temporary workarounds, the environment shifts into a state where unnoticed issues become real points of exposure. Black Friday consistently demonstrates this pattern.
Shadow Assets Created in the Seasonal Rush
High-volume periods generate digital assets that fall outside normal governance cycles. Promotional pages, temporary API endpoints, cloud buckets, and campaign-specific DNS entries are often created quickly and left untracked. These assets extend the external footprint, yet they rarely make it into asset inventories or ownership lists.
Typical examples include unindexed landing pages, storage buckets intended for short-term use, orphaned DNS records, and APIs enabled solely for load distribution. Even after the season ends, many of these assets remain exposed, giving attackers a clear advantage.
Misconfigurations Introduced Under Time Constraints
Acceleration of deployment pipelines reduces review depth. IAM roles may become overly permissive. Firewall rules opened for debugging or load testing are not rolled back. Validation steps are skipped to keep features moving toward release. These changes are rarely intentional oversights. They are by-products of compressed timelines.
Individually, these issues may seem minor. In aggregate, they create a configuration state that would not withstand scrutiny under standard audit conditions. Attackers exploit this temporary looseness because they know it appears when teams are operating at maximum speed.
Third-Party Chains Expanding Faster Than Governance
Seasonal operations increase reliance on external providers. Payment processors, martech integrations, logistics APIs, CDNs, and analytics scripts all run at elevated levels. Each brings its own update cadence, scripting logic, and risk boundaries.
A single overlooked token, SDK, or partner integration can bypass internal safeguards. Common patterns include unreviewed software updates, partner scripts with broad permissions, temporary integrations not disabled after campaigns end, and payment microservices running outdated configurations. Third-party exposure grows quickly and often exceeds the organisation’s ability to track it in real time.
Ownership Gaps Created by Parallel Workflows
During peak cycles, engineering, marketing, product, IT, and security all make rapid changes to meet demand. These changes frequently occur in parallel. Documentation lags behind. Ownership becomes unclear. Temporary assets are created without clear accountability, and configuration updates are made without fully documented approval paths.
Questions such as “Who owns this microsite” or “Who modified this CDN rule” typically surface only after something breaks. The issue is not skill but the speed at which decisions accumulate compared to the organisation’s ability to govern them.
Visibility Narrowing at the Most Critical Moment
High transaction volume shifts baseline behaviour across the environment. Authentication surges hide credential abuse. Checkout spikes mask automated activity. Legitimate scanning overlaps with adversarial probing. Detection engines rely on predictable patterns, but during seasonal peaks, those patterns become fluid.
As a result, anomalies fade into the noise. From a leadership perspective, this reduction in clarity is often more dangerous than the attack itself. When visibility narrows, exposure grows silently.
What Mature Teams Do Differently
Seasonal peaks highlight a clear divide between teams that cope with pressure and those that stay ahead of it. High-performing teams do not treat Black Friday as a one-off event. They run their environment in a way that continues to function even when timelines shrink, traffic surges, and parallel changes increase. Their strength comes from how they maintain clarity, structure decisions, and prepare the system before it is tested.
Maintaining a Current View of External Assets
Mature teams do not rely on quarterly inventory cycles. They maintain an asset picture that changes as fast as the environment does. During seasonal peaks, this becomes essential because new services, APIs, and cloud components appear rapidly.
To keep this visibility accurate, teams:
- identify new external assets as soon as they go live
- attach expiry plans to temporary campaign systems
- retire short-lived infrastructure immediately after use
This routine avoids the blind spots that usually emerge from outdated asset lists.
Prioritizing by Business Flow, Not Raw Severity
When activity spikes, traditional severity scores lose meaning. High-performing teams look at exposure through the lens of business flow. They begin with systems that sit on the critical path: checkout, authentication, payment routing, and customer-facing APIs.
This approach gives direction during alert spikes.A moderate issue in a high-value pathway often carries more operational risk than a high-rated issue in an isolated component.
Mature teams recognise these differences quickly because their prioritization model reflects how the business actually works.
Validating Internal Assumptions Before They Break
Advanced teams regularly test the assumptions that usually remain unchallenged. They examine IAM boundaries, gateway behaviour, data flows, and rate controls with the intent to confirm what holds under load.
This involves cycles such as:
- testing high-value workflows in peak-like conditions
- checking whether monitoring quality drops during heavy activity
- verifying fallback logic
- reviewing which controls become noisy when volume increases
By doing this early, seasonal load becomes a practical audit of operational behaviour rather than a surprise.
Enforcing Ownership at the Point of Change
When delivery velocity increases, clarity around responsibility must increase with it. Mature organisations assign explicit owners for every temporary change. A microsite has an owner. A CDN rule change has an owner. A temporary access grant has expiry, ownership, and accountability.
To maintain control, teams ensure:
- Every asset is tied to a single accountable unit
- Changes are logged at the moment they occur
- Temporary permissions expire without manual intervention
- Business teams understand how their updates influence exposure
This structure keeps operations stable even when updates happen rapidly.
Building Exposure Reviews Into the Seasonal Calendar
High-performing teams do not wait for the surge to test resilience. They shift review cycles earlier, perform focused assessments, and increase the pace of discovery as peak periods approach.
These reviews match the behaviour of the season, not the stability of normal operations.
When the real traffic arrives, anomalies stand out clearly because the environment has already been observed under relevant conditions.
This approach replaces periodic snapshots with event-aligned visibility, which gives leadership more confidence in how exposure evolves.
How a CTEM Approach Fits Into This Operating Reality
Enterprises that handle seasonal exposure with confidence do not rely on isolated tools or once-a-year reviews. They run exposure management as a continuous program. They maintain live visibility, revisit assumptions, and connect risk decisions directly to business flows. This is the CTEM approach, where attack surface management, pentesting, and vulnerability data sit inside one operating view instead of separate silos.
1. Visibility That Adjusts With the Environment
A continuous model only works if visibility moves at the same speed as the environment. Strobes is built around that idea. As new external assets, APIs, and cloud resources appear, the platform updates the picture instead of waiting for the next scheduled report. During periods like Black Friday, this means inventory does not fall behind reality.
- Asset discovery and exposure views stay current during rapid changes
- Shadow and temporary systems surface early, not after an incident
- Critical business paths remain visible even when new assets appear around them
This is less about running one more scan and more about keeping a living map of exposure.
2. Risk Prioritization Grounded in Business Impact
In Strobes, the CTEM view is built around business context, not just raw severity. High-risk items are those that sit on important flows, touch sensitive data, or connect to key customers. This matters during Black Friday because hundreds of findings can appear at once. Teams need a way to see which ones sit on payment paths, identity systems, promotion engines, or other core services.
A practical pattern we see. A medium severity issue on a critical checkout component often receives more attention than a high severity issue on a low-value internal system. Strobes helps make that distinction visible by tying technical issues back to assets, owners, and business functions.
3. A Recurring Loop That Handles Seasonal Pressure
CTEM in Strobes is not a point-in-time activity. It runs as a loop. External assets are discovered, tested, scored in context, and fed back into a single exposure view. During seasonal peaks, organisations shorten that loop. They tighten discovery cycles, sync changes faster, and keep the exposure picture close to real time.
- More frequent updates for external asset and exposure views
- Clearer connection between findings, owners, and affected systems
- Earlier detection of temporary changes that raise exposure
This reduces the amount of guesswork that usually appears in peak weeks.
4. Security and Engineering Working From the Same Picture
One of the practical advantages Strobes customers look for is a shared source of truth.
Security, engineering, and platform teams can see the same asset graph, the same exposure data, and the same ownership tags. During a high-pressure season, this removes the usual delay where teams argue about which system changed or who is responsible for a misconfiguration. Decisions move faster because everyone is looking at the same model of the environment.
That shared view is often the difference between a contained issue and a drawn-out incident.
Conclusion
Black Friday doesn’t create new threats. It increases activity and pressure to a point where existing weaknesses surface. When traffic spikes and changes roll out quickly, small gaps become easier to exploit, and attackers use that moment to move quietly.
The real test is whether an organisation has an accurate, current view of its external surface. Clear inventories, defined ownership, and business-aligned prioritization matter far more during peak load than individual controls. Teams working in a continuous model adapt faster and experience fewer surprises because their exposure picture adjusts with the environment.
Strobes supports this approach by unifying external assets, exposure data, and context. Our free 2026 Exposure Readiness Assessment helps leaders identify where their exposure strengthens or weakens under real pressure. The best time to understand your exposure is before the next peak cycle, not during it.
