Most companies plan to offer work-from-home or mingle working options for staff to choose from after pandemics. As a Gartner survey (2020), 47% of companies allow employees to remain full-time remote work, while 43% of companies allow to provide flexible days for employees. However, the policy of remote working may not be easily made by organizations. One of the reasons will be the rising business risks of cyber security.
Before pandemics, worldwide organizations have been constantly attacked by hackers. For example, Marriot, the renowned international hotel, confirmed that nearly 500 million data from hotel guest was stolen in 2018. While in 2019, the technology giant Facebook could not prevent from the leakage of over 500 million users’ data. Unfortunately, the risks of cyberattacks only increase as more employees work at home.
Without security setting of office system such as firewall, doubtful IP address detections, the times when staffs work at home might be exposures of weakness. A variety of cyberattacks appear in recent years, according to the survey from Check Point and Dimensional Research (2020), phishing placed first (55%) and malicious websites suggesting information related to pandemics placed second (32%), while malware and ransomware accounted for 28% and 19% respectively.
Based on Bloomberg’s summary, the fear of cyber incidents is the same as the pandemic for business. Thus, to combat the threats from cyberattacks, organization should consider cyber security long-term strategy. In my opinion, educating staffs to increase awareness could be an effective way for solving phishing attack such as training employees to be able to further notice senders’ email address as well as website address before action. Nevertheless, establishing a team of security experts for developing cyber security policy and examining software and hardware security on regular basis will be a long-term solution for organizations to face the upcoming virtual challenges.
