If You Use Freelancers, Do You Need to Educate Them About Security Awareness?
Hopefully, your freelancers are security-aware. However, it is up to you to put policies into place to protect yourself from rogue or shoddy security practices by any employee, on-site or remote. Similarly, it is up to remote workers to protect themselves from vulnerable clients when working from home.
In this article, we will look at why security awareness for freelancers is important and provide some tips and insights to help you include remote workers in your security culture.
Why Is It Important a Business Knows a Freelancer Is Security-Aware?
Business systems face risks from any external entities that have access to their networks, including third-party vendors, consultants, short-term contractors, employees using their personal devices at work (BYOD) and guests.
Easy Targets
Freelancers are easy targets for cybercriminals (and, by extension, potentially you). According to an article by Kaspersky, this is largely because freelancers communicate and exchange media with a wide array of clients “they don’t know personally.”
On Twitter, the MalwareHunterTeam warned that fraudsters were targeting freelancers by advertising work on online jobs boards. The details of these jobs were supposedly contained in a .doc file, a file format some people regard as safe to download. As Kaspersky notes, it is not only executables that are dangerous; Office documents may contain macros that install Trojans and other malware on users’ computers.
Never enable macros (Source: MalwareHuntTeam)
Poor Attitudes
An Imation survey of 1,000 UK and German remote workers that found an astonishing percentage had a laissez-faire attitude to security:
- Only 36 percent said they encrypted their data
- 40 percent had lost or had a device stolen or knew someone who had
- 8 percent acknowledged they had knowingly broken a client’s security policy
Business Concerns
According to Cisco’s 2018 Mobile Security Report, more than 50 percent of CIOs surveyed (Read more...)
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from InfoSec Resources authored by Chris Sienko. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/infosecResources/~3/H8xJrbQd6fM/
