Securing Your Remote Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything about the world as we know it, including remote work. Amid the adoption of practices like sanitizing, social distancing, and remote work due to the pandemic, there’s a parallel need for systemic changes in addressing cyber threats. In 2021, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported a 7% increase from 2020, with 847,376 complaints from Americans, resulting in potential losses exceeding $6.9 billion.

Since remote working is here to stay, experts expect cyberattacks to continue increasing well into the future. Moreover, business technologies are also transforming, attracting more cybercriminals to target business data. In these circumstances, the best solution is to build your cyber resiliency and protect yourself from unforeseen attacks.

Remote working and cybersecurity

Cybersecurity has always been a challenge for businesses with sensitive data. A single unexpected breach could wipe out everything and put your existence in question. With the sudden transition to remote working, this challenge has increased for security teams. There are endless ways in which your IT network could be affected when employees are working remotely.

In a recent study, nearly 20% of organizations said that remote work contributed to their organization’s data breach, which ended up costing companies $4.96 million, 15% more than the average breach. Also, detecting breaches early is another big issue for IT security teams. In 2021, it took an average of 212 days to detect a breach, and an average of 75 days to contain one, for a total lifecycle of 287 days. Is your cybersecurity posture good enough to withstand a potential attack?

Threats you need to be aware of

Cyberthreats come in different shapes and forms. Your IT network can face various threats, ranging from basic spyware monitoring transactions to severe ransomware attacks that encrypt critical data for ransom. Understanding the potential risks to your IT infrastructure is crucial for developing a resilient cybersecurity strategy that guards your IT environment against vulnerabilities.

Let’s examine a few of the frequent cyberthreats that are prone to businesses:

• Phishing scams: Phishing emails still pose a major threat to the digital landscape of many businesses across the globe. COVID-19 communications have provided the perfect cover for these emails to lure unsuspecting users. Urgent emails may prompt remote employees to click on malware links, risking data theft or computer viruses.
• Ransomware: Targeted ransomware attacks are increasing every day. There was a 92.7% increase in ransomware attacks in 2021 compared with 2020.3 Ransomware attacks hold an organization’s critical data for a ransom, and millions of dollars are paid to hackers every year as corporates do not want to risk losing their sensitive data. However, there is no guarantee that your files will be secure even after you pay the ransom. 
• Cloud jacking: With the cloud becoming a more sophisticated way of storing data, incidents of cloud jacking have become a serious threat. These attacks occur through injecting malicious code into third-party cloud libraries or directly into cloud platforms. In essence, while a public cloud vendor provides infrastructure, users bear the primary responsibility for data security. So, bear in mind that you are mostly responsible for your data security even when it is on the cloud.
• Man-in-the-middle attack: Hackers can insert themselves in a two-party transaction when it happens on a public network. Once they get access, they can filter and steal your data. If your remote working employees use public networks to carry out their official tasks, they are vulnerable to these attacks.
• Distributed denial-of-service attack: This attack happens when hackers manipulate your normal web traffic and flood the system with resources and traffic that exhaust the bandwidth. As a result, users will not be able to perform their legitimate tasks. Once the network is clogged, the attacker will be able to send various botnets to the network and manipulate it.

Protecting your business from cyberthreats

Security readiness is something all organizations must focus on irrespective of their size. It is mandatory to have an action plan that outlines what needs to be done when something goes wrong. Most importantly, it is critical to have a trusted MSP partner who can continuously monitor your IT infrastructure and give you a heads-up on usual activities.

Investing in cybersecurity solutions is way cheaper than losing your critical data or paying a large ransom. You need to deploy advanced solutions that can keep up with the sophisticated threats of this modern age. Then, there is a list of best practices such as multi-factor authentication, DNS filtering, disk encryption, firewall protection and more for remote work.

If all these aspects of cybersecurity sound daunting to you, fret not. Check our list to grasp network vulnerabilities and safeguard your data with the right tools and techniques.