Working Remotely has made Cyberspace look like Candyland to the Bad Actors
Unsecured Wi-Fi, Personal Laptops Spell Disaster for All Businesses
One magazine author recently wrote, “We aren’t working from home. We are staying at home amidst a crisis, trying to get some work done.” Big difference.
In certain parts of the country during the pandemic, 75% of the workforce was mandated to work from home. That’s a lot of people forced to transition to using their home laptops or even work laptops on unsecured Wi-Fi systems.
When given time to prepare for the remote workers’ needs, the IT service provider (or fully-staffed IT department for a larger business) would set up a laptop with extra security measures: multi-factor authentication, secure VPN, dedicated Wi-Fi router, the works. When the stay-at-home orders were issued, most small businesses and IT service providers didn’t consider, or have time, to set up those special measures to ensure that information on the company-owned assets was going to stay secure outside the walls of the corporate office.
Stay-at-home orders caught business and IT departments off guard leading to unsecured devices used on unsecured networks.
Though the technology for remote work has existed for years, only about 4% of the workforce was working remotely fulltime. In just a few weeks after the pandemic became the “pandemic crisis” almost one-third of the workforce is working from home.
The biggest concern globally for the companies, large and small, supporting this remote workforce is the how this new workforce represents the largest “attack surface” ever seen in cyber space. As reported by Forbes.com, hackers breach the networks of the largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, by targeting remote workers. If they can hack Lockheed, what chance do you have of keeping out the attackers?
In the past couple of months hackers have targeted the US Department of Health and attacks have doubled against the World Health Organization according to a recent article in Forbes.
Cyber intelligence firms are revealing that cyber threats related to coronavirus spiked 600% from February to March this year. Some estimate that it is only a matter of time before we learn about a major cyber breach.
Small business is not immune to these attacks. A May 18, 2020, article from Yahoo! finance outlined the access points typically attacked by the cyber criminal:
- 37 percent of credential theft breaches used stolen or weak credentials
- 25 percent involved phishing
- Human error accounted for 22 percent
Small business is a perfect target. Cantrell’s Computer Sales & Service has published blogs on these topics. We encourage you to read them to tap into their expertise:
If you suspect you have been the target of a phishing scam or any other type of cyber-attack, contact Cantrell’s immediately at 925.827.1200 to have your networks and devices examined.
If you haven’t yet been a target of a cyber-attack and want peace-of-mind, a perfect starting point is to have Cantrell’s Computer Sales & Service complete an inexpensive risk assessment that will identify security and data vulnerabilities.
Why wait until you are hacked to set up your secure networks and improve the security of your assets (both the workers and the laptops they work from)?
Email Cantrell’s at sales@crsfbay.com or call 925.827.1200 to request an appointment to start securing your networks and your valuable data.
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