Summer vacation season creates the kind of conditions identity attackers look for: reduced staffing, slower response workflows, inconsistent login behavior, and more time to operationalize stolen credentials before suspicious activity is investigated.
At the same time, organizations continue to deal with an expanding credential exposure problem driven by infostealer malware, phishing campaigns, password reuse, and years of previously compromised credentials that still circulate across criminal ecosystems. Attackers no longer need sophisticated malware to gain access into many environments. Increasingly, they simply log in using legitimate credentials that already exist outside the organization. For example, Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report found that 97% of the identity attacks it observed were password-spray attacks, showing how heavily attackers still rely on weak, reused, or guessable passwords rather than advanced malware.
This combination of valid credentials and slower operational response creates a significant advantage for account takeover attacks during the summer months.