The recent insurgence of the ‘home worker’ due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) has entirely redefined the landscape of ‘cyber-hygeine’. Best practices haven’t changed but now more than ever we need to make sure our employees and teams are looking out for one another when it comes to cybersecurity practices.
It’s incredibly worrying, but not surprising that over the last few weeks we have seen an insurgence of COVID-19 Coronavirus related spam and phishing emails. These types of emails constitute a significant source of cyber-breaches for businesses and unfortunately, it’s employees who are fooled by these ruses that are the weakest link in your cybersecurity strategy.
Employee naivety and negligence is a significant and fundamental risk to your business security. It is suggested that 4 out 5 of data breaches are caused by human error[1]. It can be very challenging to safeguard against these types of breaches now that teams are working remotely with little to no IT infrastructure in place to act as a first line to your cyber defence. There is still plenty you can do!
How can you protect your business?
Much of what the Coronavirus pandemic has encouraged us to think of is protecting ourselves. We should be taking the same approach to the cyber-health of our businesses. We need to be aware of all the many ways that viruses can spread through our infrastructure and mitigate as many of them as possible.
Improving the first line of defence for your devices is a really quick win. Think of it as the social distancing strategy we are all having to abide by. If your devices are as far away from viruses as possible, the likelihood of a cyberattack being successful decreases massively. This can be achieved by implementing simple and cost-effective tools such as antivirus solutions and email spam filtering tools.
Just as importantly, employee training helps to instil best practice techniques for your teams to stay vigilant towards bad actors[2] when working from home. Hold a conference call with your teams and update them on the latest trends in cybersecurity awareness. We have recently moved our employee training sessions to Zoom and Microsoft Teams. If you would like us to hold one of these for your team just ask!
Let’s make sure that you’re successfully mitigating all the cyber-risks to your organisation. We know it’s a challenging time for lots of businesses, and a cyberattack or data breach is just not what you guys need right now. We’re around more than ever to lend a hand or offer a bit of advice.
[1] https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/blog/4-of-the-5-top-causes-of-data-breaches-are-because-of-human-or-process-error
[2] A cybersecurity adversary that is interested in attacking information technology systems.
