Why strengthening cyber resilience ahead of Holy Week’s long weekend matters

By Claire Huang

As a predominantly Catholic country, the Philippines observes Holy Week as a deeply meaningful nationwide break that is anticipated every year, with long weekends starting from Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday.

As Filipinos observe Holy Week traditions like Visita Iglesia, cyber attackers see this long break as an opportunity to target businesses operating on reduced staffing and slower response times.

In 2020, an alarming cyberattack through malware and phishing was made during a long weekend on a major Philippine government-owned commercial bank. Cyber attackers took advantage of the Independence Day long weekend and stole millions of pesos, hacking systems to get through online transfers and ATM withdrawals.

Ironically, while Philippine businesses adopt cloud and AI to scale, attackers are using the same technologies to launch automated attacks to get into these systems.

In the third quarter of 2025, data breaches surged to 49%, highlighting how AI-enabled attacks increase speed and scale of cyberattacks in general. Notable among these are phishing campaigns, credential abuse, and increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks.

Despite the implementation of the National Cybersecurity Plan 2023-2028, the Philippines’ digital transformation might be outpacing the cyber defenses of organizations. AI-generated phishing emails are designed to appear authentic, collecting and analyzing information from the web that is publicly available. AI is also enabling more advanced forms of credential abuse, allowing attackers to analyze login patterns by replicating login times or locations, predict password variations, and mimic legitimate employee behavior. These AI-enabled attacks can dynamically adapt to bypass security filters and anomaly-based detection systems, and gain unauthorized access to corporate networks.

As Holy Week approaches, businesses must be on the lookout for ransomware attacks which are typically designed to remain dormant within systems, identifying critical infrastructure and striking at vulnerable moments, such as holidays.

Recent findings from the Synology 2025 ASEAN Digital Transformation Trend Survey of IT professionals highlight the growing scale of the problem. More than 55% of organizations reported experiencing or nearly experiencing ransomware attacks, while 22% said they had already fallen victim to such incidents.

As these threats become harder to detect and prevent, businesses can no longer rely on prevention alone. The existence and availability of data recovery solutions today could arm businesses, especially during vulnerable holiday breaks.

For businesses whose significant success is attributed to maintaining customer data security, data breach from AI-enabled cyberattacks could result in revenue loss, impact operations, and damage reputation. Once this happens, there is no turning back. Not having a clear response plan is costly. To minimize disruption, businesses must prioritize rapid data restoration and accelerated response times.

According to the same ASEAN survey, only 22% of organizations said they are very confident in their disaster recovery strategies, while 47% reported being only somewhat confident in their ability to restore operations after a cyber incident. Testing practices further highlight the preparedness gap. More than one in five organizations test their data recovery plans less than once a year, while 15% do not test them at all.

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the cyber threat landscape, preventing every attack is no longer realistic. Cyber resilience is the new priority for organizations — maintaining secure data backups, isolating recovery environments, and ensuring systems can be restored quickly when incidents occur.

Solutions like Synology ActiveProtect are designed to support this shift by empowering businesses and organizations to reduce manual workloads, standardize backup and recovery processes, save time, and ensure continuous operations.

Strengthening cyber resilience is the key to safeguarding operations and data in these times of constant threats, not to mention providing peace of mind, so that all business leadership can focus on the long holiday break.

Claire Huang is the Country Manager of Synology Philippines.