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Cybersecurity after COVID-19: How to Secure Business against the new threat landscape

Covid19 offers various things such as workplace safety protocol, and employees feel anxious about their safety. It is the matter of seconds, the attacker enters the network. It is clearly visible to see how COVID19 has become beneficial for cyber criminals. Newly remote workers are overwhelmed with the security team as the security is a huge question when you are working remotely.

Credit helpnetsecurity

Cyber defenses

The COVID19 pandemic has exposed the business getting impacted by the cyber-attack.

A survey of incident response (IR) professionals found 53% encountered cyber attack exploited COVID19, VPN vulnerabilities 45% and staff shortage is 36% as most intimidate endpoint security challenge.

Many businesses are relying on VPN for protection, this is the one of the reasons for hype in the vulnerabilities and this becomes a major concern. We need to update cycles for software patches which occur on a weekly basis. Still It may not be enough to protect your information.

If we talk about vulnerabilities, IR (Incident Response) professionals point out to use Internet Of Things technologies, personal devices like iphones, ipads, web conferencing applications, all of which are becoming popular due to employees working from home.

Attackers can attack family environments easily instead of an organization’s network, it may originate in home infrastructure.

How to  defense your data

As COVID19 impacted us in many ways, we need to use firm defense against new vulnerabilities in the organizations, shortage of staff is itself a vulnerability, integrating endpoint technologies, IT and security teams or adapting new networks and remotely working.

Let’s talk about some points to defense our data:

  • Practice Digital distancing– Employees who’re working from home must have two different routers, so they can work on the one router while you can use your other device on another router.
  • Real time updates, policies and configurations across the network–  Update VPN’s and fix the configurations across remote endpoints and other security updates.
  • Communicate– About risk factors (phishing, smart devices, file sharing apps) protocols and security updates.
  • Collaborate between IT and Security teams– We need to align with the IT person to become an expert of your system.

Attackers will continue to exploit vulnerable situations. Business must focus now on defense to better protect against the threats.

Reference:

hxxps://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/09/08/cybersecurity-after-covid-19-securing-orgs-against-the-new-threat-landscape/

About the author

Rashi is a cyber security specialist with a degree in Cybersecurity. She has led teams in analyzing and implementing security best practices.

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Top Cyber Security Trends impacting work from anywhere in 2021

Due to the Coronavirus, a huge amount of businesses had to operate remotely and cybersecurity has become trendy in 2021 because criminals are keeping an eye on the businesses.

It is difficult to estimate about 2021 as we have seen a lot of attacks done by criminals during Covid pandemic 2020. Things are changing so quickly around the world these days, which makes things so unpredictable.

In any case, the Cybersecurity area will get impacted by the COVID even in 2021.

 

credit ifsecglobal

Let’s look how Remote workers will be impacted by Cyber Criminals.
As we learnt from 2020 that remote workers will be the best focus for attackers and surely it will continue in 2021.

  • Remote workers are using their personal Wifi, and other devices for their work which is not strong and protective as we get in corporate devices and networks. This can be a piece of cake for attackers.

  • Most of the businesses are not prepared for remote work as they don’t get the security protocol rights remotely and criminals are aware about it.

  • The personal devices are easy to attack. That is one of the main reasons that corporations don’t allow employees to bring their own devices.

There was a 148% growth in the number of ransomware attacks as per the global organizations observed. The main reason has become remote work. Most of the attacks were done by using Phishing, text, instant mail, and third party applications. As the COVID hasn’t ended yet, it is expected that business will continue to get impacted by the remote work but this will become a threat about scams, phishing and other threats may have to face by the employees.

Social media attacks
Social media attacks are targeted to the individual account as well as the business accounts as businesses are being active throughout the social media in this pandemic. Hackers are looking for poor authentication vulnerability to exploit the accounts. Social media account can be an easier one.

If you use the multi factor authentication in your account only then you can feel safe in this social media era otherwise it can compromise the data as soon as you click on the URL which looks familiar to you.

Employees need to be more aware of these attacks while posting, signing up for any event, communicating with the company’s social media account.
According to the National Security Cyber Centre, “user training is extremely valuable in reducing the likelihood of successful of social engineering attacks”

Cyber security training is expected to have higher demands in 2021 for the employees to work remotely.

Why are automations proposing a threat for cybersecurity?

It is common for hackers to use the automation attack to business networks and servers. There are different automation tools such as Artificial Intelligence(AI), machine learning (ML), robot process automations.

Data Breaching is still going on by criminals

Business has a lot to do with data as we create, collect and store data. Data is the most important asset in the universe. As the organizations use the digital footprint and it attracts endpoint hackers. It is more easy to access remote worker information as it is less protected personal networks.
In this pandemic, an organization increases their VPN capacity 59% for remote workers because remote workers use VPNs and additional security measures to protect company data while working remotely.
VPN works in a smart way, when information is sent via personal network, VPNs shuffle the data so it becomes unreadable and becomes useless for cyber criminals.

Usage of VPN is recommended in order to protect the data while working remotely.

Reference:

4 cyber security trends set to influence remote work in 2021

Please share your thoughts and experience. Suggestions most welcome

About the author

Rashi is a cyber security specialist with a degree in Cybersecurity. She has led teams in analyzing and implementing security best practices.