When Grant Thornton surveyed more than 250 CFOs in February 2021 and asked them to name the three biggest challenges facing their companies, nearly half cited cybersecurity risks, and 30% said a remote workforce. The number of employees working remotely during the pandemic can be directly linked to an increase in cybercrime for several reasons, says one cybersecurity expert.
1) Although a variety of technology changes have occurred to support a remote work model, the security controls to support these models are still catching up with remote-work capabilities; 2) bad actors continue to focus on remote workers, leveraging messaging related to the pandemic in their social engineering activities; and 3) the increased stress of the pandemic on employees combined with poor remote security controls has resulted in increased data theft for personal gain. As work laptops have been increasingly used for personal work, their vulnerability to phishing, malware and ransomware attacks has increased.
Many organizations have already moved some or most of their services and work environments to the cloud, which can help improve security. For example, companies are operating intranets in the cloud using direct, private connections and virtual desktop interfaces. More organizations are also exploring DevSecOps — short for development, security and operations. Essentially it means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. Find out more about cybersecurity solutions for a remote workforce.