Frayed cybersecurity
Working from home has eased the lives of many people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, some happen to be cybercriminals.
Seven months into the computer age’s first global pandemic, nearly two in three companies in Western industrial democracies have seen a rise in phishing and social-engineering attacks targeting their workforces. That’s according to a report on global remote-work risks the Ponemon Institute did for the firm Keeper Security.
There are three main reasons, according to the report: Insufficient training and guidance for work-from-home employees, overwhelmed and ill-equipped IT security workforces and a surge in new technologies for online collaboration, many of which have exploitable rough edges.
There are other worrying trends. Theft of logins and passwords has jumped 52%, and account takeovers are up by half. Nearly three in five security professionals consider smartphones their organizations’ most vulnerable points of digital attack. Most respondents said letting employees use their personal cellphones for work has degraded security.
Ponemon surveyed more than 2,200 security professionals in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand for the study. Their organizations reported an average of 58% of employees working remotely, just over twice the pre-pandemic figure.