Enjoy the rest of your summer vacation say the hacking community, as you’re far less likely to be targeted now than during your Christmas and New Year holidays.

That’s the message from Tufin Technologies’ “Hacker Habits” survey which was conducted amongst 79 hackers at the annual gathering of hackers at Defcon 17 in Las Vegas in July.

Eighty nine percent of hackers admitted that IT professionals taking a summer vacation would have little impact on their hacking activities, as a whopping 81% revealed they are far more active during the winter holidays with 56% citing Christmas as the best time to engage in corporate hacking and 25% naming New Year's Eve.

“It’s received knowledge in the security world that the Christmas and New Year season are popular with hackers targeting Western countries,” said Michael Hamelin, chief security architect, Tufin Technologies. “Hackers know this is when people relax and let their hair down, and many organisations run on a skeleton staff over the holiday period.”

If you want to know when you should be most on your guard it’s during weekday evenings with 52% stating that this is when they spend most of their time hacking, 32% during work hours (weekdays), and just 15% hacking on weekends.

Ninety six percent of hackers in the survey said it doesn’t matter how many millions a company spends on its IT security systems, it’s all a waste of time and money if the IT security administrators fail to configure and watch over their firewalls. Eighty six percent of respondents felt they could successfully hack into a network via the firewall; a quarter believed they could do so within minutes, 14% within a few hours. Sixteen percent wouldn’t hack into a firewall even if they could.

“This may be stating the obvious,” said Hamelin, “but poorly configured firewalls remain a significant risk for many organizations. It’s not the technology that’s at fault, but rather the configuration and change control processes that are neglected or missing altogether. Best practice suggests you should test and review your firewall configuration regularly, but many organisations fail to do so.”

Validating the frustrating gap between compliance and security, 70% of the hackers interviewed don’t feel that regulations introduced by governments worldwide to implement privacy, security and process controls has made any difference to their chances of hacking into a corporate network. Of the remaining 30%, 15% said compliance initiatives have made hacking more difficult and 15% believe they’ve made it easier.