Timing is everything

Social engineering attacks are well-known to prey on human weaknesses. Besides these weaknesses, humans insist on eating, sleeping, and partaking in non-work activities. On a global scale, work schedules combined with IT policies leave large windows of vulnerability - but how large? We examine calendar data through the year 2010 and locate the longest vulnerability windows which could be exploited by well-timed attacks by malicious software. The same data can be analyzed to solve a related problem: determining the best times to release software patches.