You’re wearing your mask, working from home and generally keeping your distance. You’re doing your part to stop the spread of COVID-19, but are you taking all possible precautions? What are you and your company doing to boost your immunity to cyber security threats?
In the absence of an on-premises IT department, protection of your company’s data falls to individual employees. It is crucial that employees working from home follow the guidelines below to build a strong and unified cyber security system.
1. Keep Devices Strictly Business
A work from home environment creates unique vulnerabilities that cyber criminals are eager to exploit. This is why sensitive data should be kept within pre-approved channels where it can be adequately monitored and managed. Never save sensitive data to your desktop or unauthorized cloud storage accounts. You should also avoid sending sensitive data via email, team chat, or personal devices.
Speaking of personal devices, do not plug USB devices that are not pre-approved by your IT department into a company device. Personal USB devices may be insufficiently secure, especially if you do not have encryption enabled.
Indeed, it is best to refrain from using any personal devices without the knowledge and approval of your IT department.
2. Ensure Passwords Pass Inspection
When inventing passwords for different accounts, be sure to vary password usage. All of the passwords you use should be unique for each account and difficult for a potential attacker to guess. Creative passwords minimize the potential damage that a data breach could cause.
Passwords should be easy to remember and difficult to guess. When creating a password, try to memorize a series of unrelated words and combine them together into a passphrase. Ideally the password you come up with should not contain any personal details about you such as your birthday or your childrens’ names.
3. Read Emails Carefully
Phishers are known to impersonate legitimate people and organizations via email and they are doing it at an alarming rate since the pandemic pushed people into home offices.
To protect against phishing email attacks, never open an attachment unless you are confident that the message is from a legitimate party. Before clicking a link, hover over the link and check the bottom-left corner of your browser to see where it actually leads. Read the domain carefully to make sure that it’s a legitimate website. A misspelling or other seemingly minor inconsistency can indicate an impersonation attempt.
We’re all in this together—make sure that all employees are working from home with the same level of security. eMazzanti can help. Contact us today.
