When the Covid-19 pandemic caused lockdowns and devastated all economic activities, it pushed numerous companies to allow a significant part of their workforce to operate from home. As a result, the concept of remote work or work-from-home gained high popularity around the corporate world. However, while this setting boosted work-life balance and provided flexibility, it quickly made those companies vulnerable to potential cybersecurity risks as well, such as identity fraud and data breaches.
The important fact to note is; while some cybersecurity mistakes can be easily managed, such as weak passwords or unsecured Wi-Fi, they can pose a real threat to company welfare if ignored. Companies may lose reputation, customer trust, and even tons of money at the hands of few employees, sitting at home and jeopardizing company data unknowingly.
As you can deduce by now, rigorous cybersecurity measures have now become a necessity rather than luxury, in order to protect organizations whose employees work remotely elsewhere. Therefore, business owners must invest in advanced approaches such as the zero-trust model, multi-factor authentication, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), and other ways to protect their organizations from potential cyber-attacks.
As a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions for all types of businesses in St Louis, Missouri, and parts of Illinois, Acropolis Technology Group, understands everything you need to do to transition towards a remote work setting. That is why; our experts have compiled a list of 5 top-most cybersecurity risks when working from home, to help you identify potential cyber risks before they become a real threat.
Following these tips will help to ensure optimal cybersecurity in any work environment, protecting confidential information and keeping your devices safe.
1. Mixing up Personal and Work Devices
Working from home is a completely different work style as compared to a conventional office setup. It blurs the line between work and home in ways that creates new vulnerabilities for organizations and their workers. While many companies provide proper work devices for remote work, others allow employees to use their personal devices when and where needed.
However, your employees are humans and prone to error. Numerous surveys conducted over the past year revealed that employees who use their personal devices such as smartphones, home desktops, personal laptops and home printers to do office work know very little about security procedures and many even use their work devices for personal use like playing games, online video streaming and home learning since no one is watching them at home.
So what’s the risk?
- Your employee might download or save confidential data /records/ documents on their personal device and forget to delete it. These files can be accessed by hackers easily if the device is unsecured.
- Your employee might use a compromised personal device to access a secured office network or database causing the virus to transfer to secured servers.
- Your employee might get distracted and leave the device open in a public place for prying eyes.
- Your employee might save important passwords in their personal phones or laptops which are in use of other family members.
- Your employee might log in to the company account through an un-encrypted or un-updated smartphone.
- Your employee might open a fraudulent website for the purpose of gaming or video watching allowing hackers to access the workstation which has office- related confidential documents.
- Your employee might use a home printer for printing a confidential company file and leave it on the network which a cybercriminal can intercept.
These are only a few scenarios where a small mistake could leave the door open for hackers into your company’s systems. Remember, cybercriminals know that human mistakes are easy to exploit rather than breaking the security of sophisticated software.
2. Connecting to Unsecured Wireless Networks
While many organizations usually consider securing the work devices of their remote employees, they tend to forget the risks concerning the unsecured Wi-Fi networks these workers are using at home. Home Wi-Fi is usually not as secure as office Wi-Fi and may pose great risks to company data security.
For example, while many employees remember to update their workstation’s antivirus software or smartphone OS, they often overlook important updates to home router software. This can result in data breaches by hackers since routers will have security gaps that needed patches through timely updates.
Moreover, while organizations typically install firewalls in their workplaces to check network traffic and block any suspicious activity, their employees do not have firewalls to guard their networks at home.
Another problem is when your workers are connecting to the internet or accessing office accounts using public Wi-Fi on their work devices. In this situation, hackers can easily monitor their unsecured connection and grab confidential company data.
Employees must understand that plain text data which is unencrypted and being exchanged over public Wi-Fi is an easy target for cybercriminals. Therefore, companies must warn their workers of the risks of public or unsecured home Wi-Fi and train them to use VPN at all times.
3. Not Using the Right Passwords
One major cybersecurity concern that organizations can’t really control is the problem of weak passwords. This is where all firewalls, VPNs, and other sophisticated network security software tend to fail because your employees are not using the right passwords. Cybercriminals are well aware of how to crack corporate account passwords to access confidential company records.
Hackers use numerous tactics to crack passwords. For example, they have lists of common passwords that they try on accounts until the right one clicks. Or they write special code which will continuously try to crack account passwords by trying on different combinations till they succeed.
Another common human error is using the same passwords for multiple accounts. So if the hacker gets his hand on one password, he can easily open up other accounts as well. Employees must therefore never mix up company and personal passwords for the sake of ease.
4. Sharing Un-encrypted Company Data
When employees are working from home, they are constantly sharing confidential company data, client records, and documents over the network. Not only are they uploading business information on the cloud but also opening corporate emails, downloading attachments, and texting sensitive information to other colleagues. If sensitive company data is compromised, it can lead to ransomware attacks, data theft, and even identity fraud. Hence companies must understand how crucial it is to encrypt all information when it’s in transit over remote networks.
5. Falling for Phishing Scams Unknowingly
Becoming a victim of phishing schemes is the most dangerous and perhaps the most common cyber threat faced by home-working employees. In a phishing attempt, the hacker appears as a genuine company or person and asks the worker to provide sensitive information. This information could be the account login ID and password of a secure company account. If the employee is not careful, he or she can be easily fooled.
Phishing attempts are common in the form of emails. The attacker designs such a sophisticated email, that it passes all email filters and lands into the employee’s inbox. These emails sometimes have malicious attachments or links that shouldn’t be downloaded or clicked.
Studies conducted during coronavirus revealed that there was a 600% boost seen in phishing emails during the pandemic alone as hackers attempted to target remote working employees.
To guard against this risk, all office work, if possible, should only be done on a company workstation with the right security controls. For instance, multi-factor authentication is one security procedure that should be used at the very least to stop a hacker from gaining access to a worker’s business account.
What can be done?
Your workers who are operating from home for any reason can become a nuisance for your company’s security unknowingly. They can cause cyber-attacks on the company due to their ill practices or human error.
However, it’s not always the employee’s fault to fall victim to a smart hacker, rather, it’s the responsibility of the company to properly train employees for remote work or else they might get confused.
Companies should educate their workers about the most basic security controls such as installing anti-virus software. Sometimes, even common sense knowledge needs to be reminded softly for the greater benefit of the organization.
Don’t know where to start? Contact Us today and get all your questions answered! Acropolis Technology Group has all the IT experts you need under one roof.
Written by Adnan Ahmed