5 Ways to Stay Cyber Secure While Working Remotely

Guest blog from Erin Doherty – Complete IT

This year many businesses have had to move to remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, there has been a shift in what threats are perceived as a greater risk to businesses.  According to the 2020 Netwrix Cyber Threats report, in the UK, accidental improper sharing of data by employees is now a top concern as is data theft by employees which has increased from only 30% concerned about it pre-COVID to 80% concerned now. It has also been reported that these breaches are taking longer to detect and this has been linked to the fact more people have been working from home where it can be harder to monitor user practices.

Reports like this are excellent at highlighting potential cyber security vulnerabilities and are a helpful reminder to review and adjust approaches to better mitigate the risk of key threats.

There are many steps you can take reduce these risks and keep you and your teams working safely while at home. These are our Top 5!

1. Regular Training

Carry out frequent training for all employees to ensure they understand your security policies and GDPR so they know what data they should have access to and who they can share it with. Training should also incorporate how to spot external threats like phishing attacks and what to do about them.

2. Enable 2FA or MFA

Two-Factor or Multi-Factor Authentication has been proven to help prevent cyber criminals from reaching sensitive and valuable information. This is why it’s an important added layer of protection which should be enabled on all devices and programmes used by employees when available.

3. Review Access

With employees coming and going within a business or moving into new roles, it’s important to regularly review who has access to what and remove access to data from employees if it is not needed for them to perform their role. This will help to prevent employees seeing or sharing information they are not authorised to access.

4. Antivirus

Ensuring all your employees have an up to date antivirus software installed on their work devices means that they are less likely to come across and fall victim to malicious attacks.

5. Data Minimisation

Only keep the minimum amount of information required for the business to run and only store it for as long as it is required. The less unnecessary information you have, the less likely sensitive or confidential information could get into the wrong hands.

For more information on how to keep your business’s data safe, have a look at our webinar on The Evolution of Cyber Security and Protecting Your Data