For B2B and B2C companies alike, the holiday season is a stress test for both security and customer trust. A single breach or high-profile outage during peak season doesn’t just hurt sales, it erodes customer confidence and brand equity. Treat holiday season security as a brand preservation opportunity with the goal of safe, reliable digital experiences as part of the value you deliver.

Protect Your Brand Where Customers Most Often Connect

Your websites, apps, and customer portals are the first line of defense and often the only thing your customers experience as your brand. To protect those channels:

  • Harden your public-facing assets. Follow proactive security practices like patching internet-accessible systems early, scanning for exposed services, and eliminating unnecessary external attack surface before traffic spikes.​
  • Tighten identity and payment protocols. Enforce MFA on customer and partner accounts where appropriate, monitor for credential-stuffing, and use strong fraud management controls (device fingerprinting, behavioral analytics, and transaction monitoring) to detect account takeover and payment abuse.​
  • Be intentional about your security experience. Make it easy to reset passwords safely, clearly show customers when they are your legitimate site (e.g., consistent domains, TLS, branding), and avoid confusing customer login processes that push users to bad habits like reusing passwords or ignoring warnings.​

Turn Customer Education Into Brand Value

Customers want guidance that’s simple, non-patronizing, and clearly linked to their safety. Smart education builds loyalty and positions your brand as a trustworthy partner. Actions that help include:

  • Building a seasonal safe shopping or secure collaboration hub. Provide concise tips on recognizing your legitimate communications (domains, email patterns, SMS sender IDs) and spotting common Additionally, make it easy to report brand spoofing messages with an obvious reporting link and process.
  • Proactively warning about current threats. Use banners or graphics, emails, or in-app notifications to alert customers to active phishing themes and human element breach types you’re observing in the wild (e.g., fake invoices, fake shipping notifications using your logo), along with simple steps to check for authenticity, like your BIMI verified logo next to your company’s emails in inboxes.
  • Emphasizing clarity and repetition. Clearly state across multiple communication channels that you will never ask for credentials or payment details via unsolicited links and show examples of safe vs. unsafe messages. That consistency lowers attack success rates and aligns your brand with safety.

Make Internal Controls Your Holiday Safety Net

You cannot credibly promise customer safety if your own controls are shaky, especially when teams are stretched thin over the holidays. To limit the chance that attackers use your infrastructure or data against your customers:

  • Lock down access and operations. Enforce least privilege, tighten remote access, and require phishing resistant MFA for all internal and third-party admin accounts, particularly for ecommerce, CRM, marketing automation, and email platforms.​
  • Test your ability to recover fast. Verify backups for key systems (web, payment, customer data, marketing tools) and run a restore test ahead of peak season. Fast, clean recovery from ransomware or outages limits both customer impact and reputational damage.​
  • Implement change freezes around peak dates. Reduce self-inflicted incidents by implementing change freeze windows or applying stricter seasonal change controls.  This combined with 24/7 MDR monitoring for anomalies, this helps you catch and contain incidents before customers or the media notices.

Align Incident Response With Brand And Customer Experience

The above recommendations are most helpful months before holiday crunch time. Start planning now for peak interaction times with your organization’s public-facing assets and communication channels. But, if something goes wrong now, how you respond can either cement or salvage trust. A vague or delayed response during the holidays is a brand risk itself. To be ready:

  • Integrate legal, comms, and customer support into your IR plan. Define in advance how you’ll notify customers, what you will say, and through which channels if a breach or major outage occurs.​
  • Practice customer-impact scenarios. Run a tabletop focused on holiday-specific issues like a payment system outage on a peak day, ransomware on ecommerce infrastructure, or a phishing campaign abusing your brand. Stress-test your timelines for detection, decision-making, and public communication.​
  • Prepare customer-facing response actions. Transparent, timely, and empathetic communication paired with concrete remediation steps (e.g., forcing password resets, credit monitoring support, clear FAQs) demonstrates that you prioritize customer safety over short-term optics. Done well, it can even strengthen your reputation.

Build Long-Term Trust, Not Just Seasonal Sales

Holiday security is not just a December campaign; it’s an opportunity to demonstrate what your brand stands for. B2B customers judge you on reliability and security posture just as much as functionality, and B2C customers quickly remember which brands “handled it well” when something went wrong.

By combining strong technical controls around customer-facing systems, clear and consistent customer education, and mature, customer-centric incident response practices you position your organization as a trustworthy partner in this high-risk, high-expectation season. That’s how security elevates itself from a cost center to a core competency and a brand asset.

Forrester clients can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with analysts on the Security & Risk team to discuss the above topics and more.