With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there is now a huge wave of remote workers that are accessing and transferring valuable data across different networks. With the requirements and mandates to regularize remote work, businesses now have to provide data access to workers at distant locations. This is causing a serious concern for safety and rightly so.

The challenges of IoT Security

After businesses deploy agents at different locations to their desktops and servers, you build a next generation SOC and advanced analytics. However, when you are completely reliant on the internet of things, you give perpetrators the option to imply different types of attack vectors. With diverse attacks, hackers are able to gain access to corporate networks.

IoT devices refer to the internet connected items that simplify lives and make businesses and workers more efficient. Despite their effectiveness, these devices work independently. Due to this, they often stay unmanaged and invisible to the eyes of the employee when working remotely. They are also not the items that IT management is focusing on.

These devices will often come with default credentials and vulnerabilities. These devices are present in all living and working spaces. Some common examples of them that you can find inside your home include gaming consoles, smart watches, and Alexa’s.  For perpetrators, these devices installed with motherboards can act as access points. Thus, their presence inside employee homes can cause serious cybersecurity damage to your business’s data.

The Insider Threat

While focusing on external breaches and foreign phishing attacks is important, it is worth noting that a large number of threats come from inside an organization. There are two different pieces of the insider threat. The first is the malicious insider, which refers to an employee who has legitimate access to your data.

This may be someone who takes all of your sales data to a competitor organization. Similarly, it may also be someone that takes all of your sales contact and decide that they will leak them. In a remote setting, a rogue employee has much more power and opportunities to cause insider threats.

However, this type of an insider threat, where the employee tries to intentionally cause harm is not that common. Instead, the insider threat is more likely to be someone making a mistake. Human errors and carelessness are emergent cybersecurity risks in a remote environment. This is because workers are more likely to be less attentive in home setting, and they can make mistakes when trying to adapt to remote workflow.

A simple fix for this problem would be cloud migration. When you move business operations to the cloud, you, as an admin can have full access control of the employees. This way, you can moderate their access and make instant changes. Additionally, managers in the cloud can also carry out superior monitoring and surveillance.

Worker’s Compensation and Phishing

Another thing businesses need to consider is letting their workers know how to properly create a safe workspace. It is best to inspect employee work area so that you can make some suggestion and tips that will help them make the space safer. Common causes of cyber attack exposure in the current year have been phishing.

With remote workers working from their homes, they are more likely to fall in the trap of phishing attacks. These cyber threats take shape in the form of legitimate emails, notices, popups and messages in order to deceive workers so that they can give hackers a peak at their credentials. This threat carries more danger in the remote work business environment, where all of the communication relies on emails and other third party platforms.

Phishing links are the source of a large portion of world’s data breaches. Hackers on a daily aggregate, breach hundreds and thousands of emails and messages with the phishing link included. They launch their attacks by adding a very lucrative email that relates to your specific business. This makes the email believable in the eyes of the worker.

Get Cloud Protection Now!

Prescient Solutions helps businesses avoid attacks coming from a diverse range of vectors. They are highly sophisticated system management providers that can help businesses incorporate safety and prevention tactics. They provide everything from help desks, to cloud services and cybersecurity. Fill their online form to get started, or visit their website to find out more.