As the COVID-19 pandemic forces employees to work from home, can organisations stay productive and safe?
There has been a lot of discussion surrounding remote work recently, a method of work now being encouraged by businesses of all types and sizes as a means of practising social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many businesses and employees are now experiencing this form of business transformation for the first time.
Given the suddenness with which this shift has occurred for these organisations, now is a time for clarity and decisiveness, ensuring staff, customers and stakeholders are all kept safe and informed during this time.
But there are crucial precautions that many businesses have been neglecting in this unprecedented event: precautions designed to respond to a threat you may not have considered.
Read on to find out more! Here, we discuss how you can better protect yourself from cyber threats, and reduce your chances of falling victim to hackers.
Scammers & Malware
As with any disaster or negative global event, there will always be those who seek to profit at the expense of others. Barely a month ago, there were a small number of scam emails doing the rounds related to the ongoing outbreak of Novel Coronavirus. Now, cyber security experts are warning of an emerging large-scale assault by hackers who are looking to make the most of the pandemic.
Of the thousands of websites being registered each day providing information on the outbreak, only a few are actually legitimate, with the majority being set up to exploit, deceive and steal information from vulnerable people.
This is being done through the distribution of malware, the hosting of phishing attacks and the peddling of bogus ‘cures’.
Mitigating risk & bolstering your security
With increasing numbers of employees now based out of home offices, a false sense of security will begin to develop, where workers will exercise less caution and compromise on following normal security protocols.
If you’re an employer managing employees who are now working from home, you are especially vulnerable; keeping your valuable personal and professional data secure will be even more important in these uncertain times.
This is especially true given organisations are now struggling to fill demand for work-provided laptops. As such, many of these companies are allowing staff to use their own personal devices – which are unlikely to have adequate security measures in place – to access critical and sensitive company information.
Phishing attacks
Even when workers are operating from home, they must be trained on the security threats they may encounter. Scam emails can be very convincing.
With subject lines such as ‘COVID-19 – everything you need to know,’ many may naturally be inclined to open these emails, driven by a lack of knowledge or a sense of anxiety, and go on to click the links and download the files in such emails, thus unknowingly inviting malware onto their computers and other devices. This type of attack is known as a “phishing attack”.
What does a phishing email look like?
Here are some current examples that are circulating:
Increasing your protection & preventing phishing attacks
Here are some small steps you can take now to improve your cyber security measures in this new and ever-changing landscape:
- Invest in better security systems to ensure that your employees are safe, even when working remotely.
- Review and strengthen your passwords for all external applications and remote resources, especially email.
- Ask your remote workers to look out for phishing scams; home-based workers are more vulnerable because they are less likely to follow the normal security protocols they ordinarily would in the office.
- Discuss your company’s security measures surrounding smartphones, tablets, laptops, Wi-Fi networks and printers; your workers should understand that the same rules still apply.
- Work with your data vendors to fix any outstanding issues with cyber security; let them walk you through their cyber security plans.
- In case of an emergency, collect accurate and up-to-date contact information for every employee; mobile numbers are particularly important.
Wrapping up
Looking to better protect yourself and your organisation during this event and into the future? Now more than ever, it’s vital your company and its people are keeping up to date with the latest cyber security trends, threats and developments.
And while it may be tempting to outsource your cyber security needs to offshore teams and overseas companies, keeping your data within Australia is absolutely integral.
Go overseas – especially to countries who lack Australia’s stringent data protection laws – and you risk not only losing control over your data, privacy and confidentiality, but placing that valuable data directly into the hands of bad actors, hackers and cyber criminals.
Stay here, however, and the security and safety of your data is assured, and will only ever be handled by highly trained professionals following strict security protocols. ZIRILIO is 100% Australian-based: our engineers operate entirely in-house, with each of them benefitting from over 10 years’ security experience.