While it is totally the right thing to do which is to tell the employees to work-from-home in this COVID-19 crisis, there is also an issue of security related to it. It was already known that people working from home are vulnerable to leaking details about the company because their networks are often not encrypted whereas the office environment often is. But due to this crisis, employers are forced to tell their employees to work-from-home or risk losing business or customers.
Therefore, the risk of hackers getting access to employee’s accounts and getting private information has increased whether they like it or not. Cyber experts also tell that since everyone is working from home and there is a mass movement of sorts, this is great for hackers who would have been waiting for this situation.
Cisco’s security advisor says that “People who have never worked from home before are trying to do it and they are trying to do it at scale,”. And this is true as well because we have seen various reports revealing that the majority of the companies don’t have any backups if their offices are closed. Therefore, it is obvious that they have never tried the option of work-from-home. Now that they are forced to do so, they are finding out how hard it is to do so.
According to them, the number of requests for security support to support remote workforces has jumped 10-fold in the last few weeks. One of the most common threats is that password-stealing messages and malicious software as coronavirus-themed alerts, warnings, or apps are being shared. The people who are working from home are at greater risk since they have information that should not be leaked which is different if they get the same messages on their personal PC.