Maintaining Cybersecurity While Working From Home

A Guide To Maintaining Cybersecurity While Working From Home

Cybercriminals are targeting remote workers that lack the knowledge and IT defenses necessary to maintain cybersecurity at home. Is your business at risk?

It’s a dangerous time right now, and not just because of COVID-19. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the confusion and lack of awareness resulting from the global pandemic.

Do you know how to keep your employees, and your organization as a whole, secure?

How To Maintain Cybersecurity In A Remote Setting

Make sure you have the following solutions and best practices in place:

• Implement Multi-Factor Authentication: Multi-factor authentication is a great way to add an extra layer of protection to the existing system and account logins. By requiring a second piece of information like a randomly-generated numerical code sent by text message, you’re able to make sure that the person using the login credentials is actually who they say they are.
• Verify Payments Via Phone: As you can’t meet in person to verify major financial transactions, the least you can do is confirm over the phone with the contact. Never execute a financial transfer based on an email request alone – it could very well be a cybercriminal posing as a business contact or third-party organization.
• Stay Up To Date: Did you know that one of the most common ways that cybercriminals get into a network is through loopholes in popular software? Much of the software you rely on to get work done every day could have flaws — or “exploits” — that leave you vulnerable to security breaches.  To address this, developers regularly release software patches and updates to fix those flaws and protect users. This is why it’s imperative that you keep your applications and systems up to date.
• Educate Your Employees: Now more than ever, your employees need to know how to spot social engineering scams:
  • Phishing: Phishing (and all social engineering techniques) is about the element of surprise. It’s a method in which cyber criminals send fraudulent emails that appear to be from reputable sources in order to get recipients to reveal sensitive information and execute significant financial transfers.
    
  • Business Email Compromise: Business Email Compromise is a social engineering technique used by cybercriminals in which they pose as a business or member of a business in order to execute fraudulent payments. In layman’s terms, a cybercriminal will write an email pretending to be from your credit union, and request that a payment be processed – instead of to a legitimate source, the payment will go to them.
    
• Use A VPN: When you use a virtual private network (VPN), your data is encrypted, or hidden, as it moves from your device to the VPN and then continues onto the Internet. That makes it harder for an attacker to identify you as the source of the data.

Don’t sacrifice your cybersecurity just so your staff can work from home. With the right technologies and processes in place, you can maintain a productive and secure remote work model.

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