The Cybersecurity Challenges of Remote Work

The world of work is changing-we spend more time working remotely than ever before. Over a year ago, the word “remote” was not something that most people thought of when they thought of work. Employees were expected to physically be in the office, and if they were working from home, they were usually doing so once or twice a week.

Moving forward, many workers will continue to have the option to work from home, and companies are doing everything they can to allow employees to do so, as long as they are able to adhere to company policies. While technological advances make it easier and possible for remote work to even be an option for companies, the result is that the risks to organizations and personal information are increasing.

Over the course of the pandemic, increased work-from-home programs and BYOD policies have led to an increase in many security challenges. In the Cyberthreat Defense Report for 2021, the findings were that a record-high of 86% of organizations experienced an attack, up 81% from the previous year. Ransomware attacks were up to 69%, a 62% increase from the year before. 57% of victims ended up paying the ransom, and 28% of those failed to recover their data.

Before the pandemic, security concerns had been the main concern behind remote work, but it’s time to admit that remote work is not going away. That means that organizations need to get better at managing remote teams and processes.

Top Remote Work Cyber Security Risks

As more of us work from home, it’s no wonder that cyberattacks are on the rise and that businesses are scrambling to figure out how to keep themselves safe. Hacker groups are discovering increasingly sophisticated ways to attack companies and steal sensitive information. Among some of the most common work-from-home cybersecurity risks include the following:

Weak Passwords

While organizations use various technologies to keep your company’s data secure, from VPNs to firewalls, they still need to take steps to ensure that their employees are doing their part. It’s all too easy for employees to be tempted to use a weak password that can easily be cracked, giving hackers a golden opportunity to infiltrate a corporate network. The best way to prevent this is by ensuring that your employees are using strong passwords, so hackers can’t crack them.

Another unsafe practice involving weak passwords is using repeated passwords. Although you may think that this practice is secure, it is another common insecure practice that hackers exploit. Most people use the same password on several accounts and reuse it across many applications (such as email, banking, and social networks), which makes it easy for hackers to gain access to all of these accounts.

Unencrypted File Sharing

With remote work, there are increased security risks of unencrypted file sharing. You may be sending sensitive information to your team via email, text, or even Slack, but it is not safe to assume that any of these means is secure. Sensitive company information could easily be intercepted, and potentially lead to ransomware attacks, theft, or more.

Insecure Wi-Fi

For employees using several different unsecured Wi-Fi networks, they put themselves at a higher risk of getting hacked. Many users connect to public Wi-Fi networks without the same protection they would at the office. This is a problem because the security requirements for a public Wi-Fi network are much lower than for secured Wi-Fi networks, and hacking into a public network is much easier-so there is a greater risk of personal information being stolen. Attackers can easily access and steal passwords, install malware and sniff out sensitive information.

Phishing

A phishing scam is an attempt to trick you into revealing personal information, such as your password or bank account number. Although phishing attacks have been around for a long time, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. It has become hard enough to spot a bogus email, but modern bots can customize the emails that they send, making them more personal and difficult to catch.

BYOD

The growing use of smartphones and other mobile devices by employees is transforming the way work gets done. With employees using mobile devices to access sensitive and proprietary information, companies are increasingly unable to control the information that employees have access to on these devices. However, this issue is not limited to employees in the office. With the proliferation of remote work, employees working outside of the office, and with a variety of other devices, like tablets and laptops, are now able to access sensitive and confidential information.

Solutions to Remote Work Challenges

So, what can be done moving forward to help keep organizations, their employees, and information safe?

If you want to be more secure on your phone, computer, or other devices at home, you can do so by using a cloud security VPN platform. A VPN serves as a secure tunnel between your device and the remote server. Because it routes all of your traffic through the VPN, your data traffic is essentially “encrypted” from the point where it leaves your device to the point where it reaches the VPN server.

But most importantly, employees need to be educated on company policies, including work-from-home policies. This means that organizations must have detailed guidelines informing employees on security issues, including how employees are expected to handle sensitive information while working remotely. Work-from-home policies can touch on matters such as procedures for maintaining data privacy and security, to using secure and private connections.

The world of cybersecurity sometimes reveals a strange paradox: sometimes the most secure systems are still vulnerable to attack. Organizations can benefit from working with a security solutions provider, especially when it comes to protecting critical assets such as the financial, transportation, and healthcare industries. Advanced German Technology (AGT) is a premier addition to the cyber-security community. As a group of computer professionals, they are dedicated to preventing and responding to cyber threats.

Learn more about AGT’s services here.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.