Working From Home: Additional Cyber-Security Tips

With the arrival of the information age, technology has found its most precious asset in the information.

As it is a valuable object, groups of criminals use their computer knowledge to steal data in a thousand different ways.

For this reason, protection against digital threats has become one of the fundamental pillars of companies when developing their business model. IT departments design new methods and tools every day to keep hackers out of our databases.

In this bizarre 2020, companies from all fields and sectors have been forced to change their business models. To survive the pandemic, working from home is becoming increasingly common. Of course, the main reason is to avoid contagion and stop the spread of COVID-19. Although it brings with it a series of benefits such as savings in electricity, office supplies, or a simplification of the shift system between workers, the change also welcomes the dreaded hackers to the scene.

How Does Work from Home Undermine Corporate Security?

If data theft and security breaches were a concern previously, with work from home increasing in leaps, data theft and hacker breaches are getting very common. The cases of companies that have lost data, workers that have been victims of phishing, and even entire companies that have seen their databases compromised are reported daily.

The problem with security emerges because, when employees work from the office, there is a protected network designed to work from within, without security breaches. There are firewalls to prevent intruders, and workers’ credentials are protected when they login to the system from within. In other words, it is a safe environment. However, when working remotely, employees don’t have that security architecture.

Ordinary people don’t have a professionally designed network to keep all their online operations intact. They use regular unprotected networks or, even worse, public networks, increasing the risk also increases threats, phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, ransomware, and malware. The list is long, and the losses of the companies are large.

Security Measures for Home Employees

The lack of an action plan by companies has caused hackers to rub their hands with the new catalog of possible victims. To keep them at bay, the company and worker must use common sense, work together, and stick to a plan of action to create a safe work environment for everyone. Although it sounds simple, you have to go a little deeper to implement a series of measures.

VPN

Virtual private networks are essential. When the worker connects from home to the company network, the information may be compromised by an unencrypted network. With a VPN, you can hide information and avoid intruders in the private system.

Backups

What happens if you still have a security breach? Information may be lost, it may become corrupted, or it may partially disappear. In the worst case, it will disrupt the entire business. This trouble can be avoided thanks to services such as Microsoft 365 backup that keep user information safe, spread over many servers around the world, while keeping it within your reach for when you need it. Security before everything.

Cloud

The more you take advantage of the emergence of cloud services, the better. There is a wide variety of cloud platforms that offer all kinds of services. They are very safe and helpful, helping clients avoid the transfer of files between physical machines.

Secure passwords

At this point, it is probably not a great discovery that hackers take less time to decipher your password if it is simple. A strong password (with numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and symbols) is much harder to crack. Although it is the most basic precaution, it is still the main shield a user can establish.

Overall, though the reality looks grim, you don’t have to be negative. The pandemic will end sooner or later, but working from home will likely become something familiar. It has caught many businesses unexpectedly, but now you have the technology to make telecommuting truly safe and hacker-proof. Use the available software to avoid being victims of online scams or cyber-attacks.