The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to consider remote work options for the workforce on a more long-term basis. As more employees continue to work from home, it is important for businesses, across all niches and sectors, to consider various new threats. Addressing remote work security concerns can help in reducing cyberattacks and hacking attempts, which can have a detrimental impact on a business. What are some of the common threats? How can your company prevent such attacks? In this post, we are discussing the basics of remote work security.
Understanding the threats
Remote employees often have as much access to company resources and data from home, as they would have from an office. In other words, there is no singular way of monitoring every single click of every employee. As such, having cybersecurity-trained employees always helps. Some of the cybersecurity threats remain the same even in remote work environments. Phishing is the most prominent example. Employees often fall prey to social engineering, ending up with security compromises. Weak Passwords are also a reason for frequent cyberattacks, and there are other threats, such as VPN attacks and phone scams.
Steps to enhance remote work security
While the new shift to WFH may seem overwhelming to employees, but there is no reason why discussing remote work security with them should be hard. Here are some basic steps that every business can follow.
- Ask employees to use virtual private network (VPN), which ensures additional security. There are many options, including ones meant for business use. VPNs can be paid on the number of users too.
- Consider installing firewall and antimalware on every system. Ask your employees to use a firewall, and more importantly, they should have antimalware and other programs to detect threats.
- Make people accountable. People need to know the dos and don’ts of remote work, and for that cybersecurity training is important. It is never late to have a training session for employees, which can be conducted online by outsourced experts.
- Reduce access to data. When it comes to remote work management, businesses need to reduce the access to resources, to the best possible. In other words, ensure that people who need access to certain data, devices, and systems, have the credentials.
Hackers are constantly looking for new ways to attack businesses. Unless the management is a step ahead in handling and monitoring remote work, the company will have to reel under the fear of these threats.
