Working From Home Due to COVID-19? Security Challenges That Need Close Watch!

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, governments are pushing organizations to allow their employees to work from home.

While this will keep the businesses running, what’s more concerning is the security factor.

Doing office work at home literally means having remote access to the organizational resources over the open network.

This poses a serious challenge to IT admins and security experts of respective organizations who will have keep a close watch on VPNs, access controls and network bandwidth.

Are you an organization who has allowed your employees to work from home? Here are few aspects of IT Security you need to have watch closely:

  • Most home networks will have more personal devices connected, which might not be that secure as in organizations and may not updated regularly.
  • Are your organizational assets in secured state under the close monitor of security controls in the internal network or over VPN?
  • Is every remote asset being scanned for threats?
  • Are your organizational policies able to govern the new entries or applications?
  • Are the controls in place to block the employee’s entry to malicious sites?
  • Do you hold a backup implementation plan ready in case assets get infected?

It’s time for organizations to be extra careful about the cybercriminals or threat actors, who would now be busy chalking out plans to hack the remote systems owing to their weak vulnerability to cyberattacks.

“These users are outside the reach of perimeter-based security tools, and will likely have higher exposure to phishing and network attacks.”says the Director of a security solutions company.

Already coronavirus-themed malware attacks have been reported globally, adding to the concerns.

“In general, attackers are looking for a vulnerability to deliver their attack. In this case, people’s fear over the virus is the vulnerability attackers will look to capitalize on,” says a Co-Founder of another security services company.

People working from home report high chances of a distraction than in the office, and often tend to work in parallel accessing personal emails and web browsing.

In the work-from-home cases, even the security experts often lose control over the environment user operates in.

Experts opine that government, energy, healthcare, BFSI, manufacturing and legal are among the top industries unprepared for the massive influx of remote work.

As the reports say, many companies under these industries are operating on legacy systems with outdated software and less often update security patches.

“Not only does this mean remote work is a security concern, but it makes working a negative, unproductive experience for the employee,” say industry experts.

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