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Due to the novel coronavirus situation, billions of people are currently working remotely, many for the first time in their lives. It could be out of personal fears of infection, in obedience of local social distancing regulations, or in accordance with company-wide policies, but the end result is an unexpected shift from the norm of working in the office to working from home (WFH).

Managing a workforce that has been suddenly transformed into a remote one is challenging on many levels, not least because of the need to maintain cybersecurity standards. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, many enterprises had yet to contemplate a mass work-from-home scenario, and they therefore lack the policies, devices, or processes to support it securely.

What's more, in recent weeks, companies have been scrambling to preserve their security profiles in the face of an uptick in malicious actors seizing the opportunity to hack corporate systems. That's the bad news. The good news is that you're not powerless. There are practical steps you can take to safeguard confidentiality and cybersecurity with a WFH workforce.

Here are a few of the basics.

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A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is the first and most obvious way to secure your organization when employees are logging in from home. When people work from home, they use public internet or weakly-secured WiFi connections to access confidential data in your central database. They also share sensitive files, offering a golden opportunity for hackers to intercept data mid-stream.

A VPN uses strong encryption to create a "tunnel" for any interactions between your employees, and between your employees and your secure corporate network.

Atlas VPN, one of the biggest VPN providers, reports that VPN use has surged in areas with high numbers of coronavirus cases, such as Italy and Spain.

Ignorance can be your biggest danger. If you're used to dealing with a secure internal network, you won't always know where your vulnerabilities and weaknesses lie when it comes to remote access.

This kind of blindness can lead quickly to data breaches that you might not even be aware of until months after the event.

To resolve this issue, use tools like Cymulate's breach and attack simulation platform, which runs simulated attacks across remote connections to assess your cybersecurity risk levels. This can help you determine the extent to which your settings, defenses, policies, and processes are effective, and where you need to make changes in order to maintain a secure organization.

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Employees are vital to your success, but they can also cause your downfall. According to security experts at Kaspersky, 52 percent of businesses acknowledge that human error is their biggest security weakness. What's more, some 46 percent of cybersecurity incidents in 2019 were at least partially caused by careless employees.

Employees can cause data breaches in multiple ways, like failing to use a secure connection to download confidential data, forgetting to lock their screens when working in a public place, or falling for phishing emails that install malware on their devices. In addition, your employees might be the first to know about a security breach but choose to hide it out of fear of repercussions, making a bad situation worse.

It's vital to invest time and energy in employee training to ensure that everybody knows how to reduce the risk of successful hacking attacks and is not afraid to report security incidents as soon as they occur. Frequent reminders, online refresher courses, and pop-up prompts help employees take security seriously.

Access controls are a vital layer of security around your network. Losing track of who can access which platforms, data and tools means losing control of your security, and that can be disastrous.

Even in "normal" times, 70 percent of enterprises overlook issues surrounding privileged user accounts, which form unseen entrances to your organization. As the WFH situation drags on, it's even more likely that access controls will lag, opening up holes in your perimeter.

In response, use role-based access control (RBAC) to allow access to specific users based on their responsibilities and authority levels in the organization. By monitoring and strategically restricting access controls, you can further reduce the risk that human error might undermine your careful cybersecurity arrangements.

Because most companies were not yet set up for remote work when the COVID-19 crisis hit, the lion's share of devices used to connect from new home offices are not owned or configured by employers.

And with employees more likely to use their own computers when working from home, endpoint attacks become even more serious. SentinelOne, an endpoint security platform, reported a 433 percent rise in endpoint attacks from late February to mid-March.

Although it can seem difficult to secure endpoints when employees are working remotely, it is possible. SentryBay's endpoint application encryption solution takes a different approach, securing apps in their own "wrappers," as opposed to working on a device security level.

Finally, weak passwords are a known gift for hackers. The problem only grows when employees work from home, as the contextual shift makes it easier for them to ignore reminders from your security team. They are also more likely to share or save credentials for faster remote access when it takes time to get a response from a newly remote security team.

If you don't already use a password manager to force employees to generate strong passwords and avoid sharing or saving credentials, now is the time to begin. CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault requires users to update passwords regularly, enforces multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce the chances of hackers entering your network through stolen passwords, and provides auditing and control features so you can track when someone uses or misuses an account.

Consumer password managers like LastPass and 1Password likewise offer business tiers with similar features.

With enterprises unprepared for mass remote working, industries worldwide could face a security nightmare. However, applying best security practices and using advanced tools to test for vulnerabilities, supervise access controls and password management, secure connections, and apply endpoint encryption can go a long way.

Make sure your employees know your security policies will help harden your attack surface, improve your cybersecurity posture, and prevent COVID-19 from causing a cybersecurity plague.

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Aspects of cybersecurity not to overlook when working from home - Big Think