Why More Cybersecurity Threats Since WFH?

As you may have noticed from the headlines, security incidents have increased significantly since the pandemic began. For a start, complaints to the FBI’s Cyber Division are up 400% from before the COVID-19 pandemic and come especially from small and medium-sized businesses.

Not surprisingly, one of the biggest reasons for this uptick in attacks is the widespread and sudden switch to work-from-home (WFH). This switch presents a sea change not just in how we conceptualize ‘work’ in the 21st Century, but how we secure scores of workers who now make up a distributed workforce rather than a single, unified ‘office’ as we’ve traditionally understood it.

In this post, we examine some of the WFH factors contributing to this rise in incidents.

1) Hasty Implementation

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The pandemic took the whole world by surprise and showed us just how unprepared we were for sudden disruption. Businesses scrambled to continue operation in the face of lockdown orders and travel restrictions. As a result, this sudden and unexpected shift to WFH meant, in most cases, a rushed, hasty implementation of tools to support an army of now-remote workers.

Because most organizations lacked the existing infrastructure to enable widespread WFH, the solutions implemented were stopgap measures for a crisis. They likely didn’t get the same level of vetting or integration that would normally be expected from an IT solution. The imperative at the time was simply to get it done and get the company back up and running.

Months later, however, these initial hasty solutions have settled in as standard operating procedure as few have gone back to shore up the initial “temporary” solutions. With that comes the propagation of  many vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit.

2) Old factors, New again

Distributed network threats have been a problem long before the switch to widespread WFH. (Read more...)