Friday, May 08, 2020
According to a recent Kaspersky report, How COVID-19 changed the way people work, three-in-four (73%) employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic have not yet received any specific cybersecurity awareness guidance or training from their employer. Additionally, one-in-four (27%) employees said they have received phishing emails related to COVID-19.
With employees worldwide making the shift to working from home, it is important for businesses to ensure their staff can do so safely. This can be challenging as it takes an abundance of resources to enable secure access to services that staff regularly need for their daily jobs. As such, establishing effective cybersecurity measures is critical as remote working may also bring new risks such as increased spam and phishing attacks, connecting to compromised WiFi spots or the use of shadow IT by employees.
A survey of 6,000 workers around the world has shown that employers may not be explaining to their employees how to avoid becoming victims of cyberattacks. Accidental downloading of malicious content from attacks such as phishing emails can lead to devices being infected and business data being compromised. Many employees have also increased the use of online services for work that were not approved by their IT departments, known as shadow IT, such as video conferencing (70%), instant messengers (60%) or file storage services (53%).
“It is difficult to keep things ‘business as usual’ when everything needs to change so dramatically,” said Andrey Dankevich, senior product marketing manager at Kaspersky. “While employees are trying to get use to the new reality of working from home, IT and cybersecurity teams are under pressure to enable them to continue working safely. Cyber-incidents can only add difficulties to this challenge, so it is important to remain vigilant and make sure remote working is also secure working.”
Kaspersky advises the following recommendations to help businesses enable secure remote working for their employees:
To read the full Kaspersky report and learn more about how the pandemic has influenced the way people work, please visit this page.
About Kaspersky
Kaspersky is a global cybersecurity company founded in 1997. Kaspersky’s deep threat intelligence and security expertise is constantly transforming into innovative security solutions and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure, governments and consumers around the globe. The company’s comprehensive security portfolio includes leading endpoint protection and a number of specialized security solutions and services to fight sophisticated and evolving digital threats. Over 400 million users are protected by Kaspersky technologies and we help 270,000 corporate clients protect what matters most to them. Learn more at usa.kaspersky.com.