Home workers beware, part 2

The laptop at home is much less secure than in the office. In most cases, someone will log into the work server from home via a public channel. That requires a strong password, much stronger than would be necessary in the work environment. Most homeschoolers do not have such a strong, hard-to-crack password.

Barely an overview

On top of that, many system administrators have much less insight into what is happening on the network with laptops at home. It may even include doing the children’s school work on the laptop, or a game. Or the virus scanner or firewall is disabled. This implies a much lower level of security and, as a result, the risk of a ransomware or virus attack is much higher. The figures show that those attacks are actually increasing in number. According to an article in Computable, researchers see a lot of phishing, rogue attachments, malicious links, fake Web pages, downloaders, spam and other coronavirus-themed malware. There are also misleading emails asking employees to send money and data to fake accounts and recipients. Hackers also pretend to be employees of the company’s IT department in order to find out all kinds of sensitive information.

Limit human error!

Staff training, proper maintenance of remote workstations, and reducing human error. The latter point in particular is the weak link for many organizations. An email attachment is quickly opened, a weak password easily cracked. With the increase in working from home, this is only increasing. The key is to ensure that data is stored in such a way that nothing can happen. Or at least ensure that the impact of an attack is as low as possible.