Cybersecurity Threats in the Age of Remote Work

As the digital world continues to advance and continue to give us this rapid development that we will not have dream to have in our world decades ago, making life better, there are also certain concerns rising up daily about the digital world and one of it is the high risk of the cyber security threats that keeps rising up. One of the things COVID pandemic does to us is to push the digital world into massive adoption much more than before. We now have a remote work been done and giving organisations options to explore the digital world.

But of course, this does not come free as it comes with its own price to pay. Before 2020-2021 when the pandemic happens, remote work was something of a distance reality in our society. But with the lockdown policy brought up, a lot of employees and companies have no choice but to adopt the remote work option and this transition even though it comes with a lot of benefits, but it didn't come without giving challenges that came with it.

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Remote work have been exposed to several cyber security threats than before which is a great concern. We have several of them which I will be talking about. Let me start from the phishing attacks. The phishing attacks has become something frequent that is happening and in this attack, it deals with hackers sending fraudulent links, emails that look to be legit but this is in a way to get the user password and generally their private keys and personal data.

The second cyber security attack that has been on prominence rise is the poor authentication practices or weak password when it comes to the remote work niche. The challenge is that a lot of employees might be prone to use the same password which opens it to be easy to crack and hack. Cyber criminals are actually capitalising on this to get into accounts of organisations and big companies.

Even before the two I have mentioned, there is a way unsecured home networks can open the door for cyber criminals to carry out their fraudulent activities if not careful. They can make use of the home WiFi networks which most of the time and from my experience is not secured enough. With that, they can get access to corporate networks and make them to have access to important company data which should be kept secured.

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Working using remote work option will definitely require you to make use of your personal devices like your smartphones or your laptop. Even though those personal devices can provide ease for working, the other side of it is the fact that if those personal devices are not secured, it can open the door for cyber attacks. If antivirus softwares, firewall protections are not installed on the personal devices, it can lead to give access for the cyber criminals to access the devices and also carry out their fraudulent activities.

Talking about how one can mitigate cyber security threats, I will say one of the ways to actually deal with it is to put into place some certain measures. Measures like MFA, having regular security training among the employees even though they might be working remotely. Most of the access that the cyber criminals have to carry out their cyber fraudulent activities is due to lack of thorough training on cyber security. Another ways to deal with cyber security is to come up with usage of Virtual Private Networks which is called VPNs. This will help encrypt data and help to have a secure connection whether in the office or at home remotely.

At the end of the day, I am quite so positive and optimistic about the future of remote work and I am so sure that it will continue to get better and better. Of course there will be challenges, but I believe as time goes on, more solutions will keep coming up. We are in the digital world and it will transform a lot of things around positively. More cyber security measures will keep coming up and the digital world will be a better place to be than it is right now. The future is certainly bright as I am so sure of that.

For Further Studies.

• https://www.kwikom.com/blog/cybersecurity/2024/04/25/cybersecurity-threats-in-the-age-of-remote-work/

• https://www.collaboris.com/cybersecurity-remote-work/

• https://www.wheelhouseit.com/cybersecurity-in-the-age-of-remote-work/

• https://brandefense.io/blog/drps/cybersecurity-in-the-age-of-remote-work-challenges-and-solutions/

• https://skillogic.com/blog/cybersecurity-in-the-age-of-remote-work/#:~:text=Phishing%20and%20Social%20Engineering&text=Social%20Engineering%3A%20Attackers%20may%20use,gain%20trust%20and%20trick%20employees.