When huddled with your laptop into the kitchen nook, or spread across the couch, the comfort of your home should never soften your cybersecurity awareness. Don't let the tidal wave come crashing down on you and your business.
If you’ve joined the Work From Home tidal wave in the last month (16 million of you, according to Slack), your home is now an extension of your office.
This essentially brings its fair share of obstacles: Kids and pets invading your workspace, distracting sounds inside (and outside) your home throughout the day, finding the bandwith to support those video meetings, and navigating the boundaries between “work” and “home”.
But perhaps the biggest obstacles could be securing your new workspace.
This is especially critical as COVID-19-related cyber attacks are infiltrating the workplace. As reported by Google,18+ million malware emails related to the coronavirus are sent out every day (along with 240+ million COVID-19 daily spam messages). Cybercriminals ramped up phishing attacks over 667% in the month of March alone, according to cybersecurity awareness organization KnowBe4.
When huddled with your laptop into the kitchen nook, or spread across the couch, the comfort of your home should never soften your cybersecurity awareness. Don't let the tidal wave come crashing down on you and your business.
5 Cybersecurity Tips Amid the Work From Home Tidal Wave:
1. Begin with the basics.
Everything you already likely know, but might not keep top of mind from your home office. Use passwords on all your devices and apps. And speaking of passwords… remember ... 12 characters, a mix of numbers, symbols, capital and lowercase letters mixed.
If not already, password protect your laptop and never leave it unattended.
2. Secure your home workspace.
This begins by ensuring that your laptop is fully patched and updated on anti-virus and anti-malware software. Additionally, make sure you're working under your home’s secure wi-fi network, backed by a strong password. Never trust public wifi.
Finally, ensure your network is secure through the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
3. Recognize socially engineered attacks.
COVID-19 related phishing attacks running wild. It’s crucial that you have the ability to detect and avoid malicious attacks in your inbox by assessing and decoding the anatomy of fake emails. Check BEFORE you click.
Also, have a request via email that seems strange? Confirm with colleagues. Even in a remote environment, inter-departmental communication here is as crucial as ever. Two-factor approval, much in the same vein as two-factor authentication, involves employees request across departments training themselves to call a known, internal colleague to confirm that a request for information was in fact sent from that individual.
4. Keep video conferencing secure.
Don’t share meeting links. Require a password for meeting entry. And for the attendees, don’t freely share meeting information without checking with the moderator first.
Many consumer-grade video conferencing solutions don’t provide the right administrative tools to fully lock meetings down. Business-grade solutions like GoMeet provide 24x7x365 security, with full-time security staff and systems for log and event monitoring, incident response, managing intrusion prevention systems (both host and network), perimeter defense service and architecture testing.
5. Consult your technology partner.
Have further questions about locking down your remote workstation? Or are you an IT director attempting to build a strategic "Work From Home" plan for your workforce? These matters should be a coordinated effort between you and your technology partner.
Remote work is now a reality for businesses right now. But security measures should remain unchanged. Whether you're hoping to optimize productivity for a remote workforce, or just getting started, we'd love to visit to discuss how a Unified Communications plan can help your organization.
