The COVID-19 pandemic has been the headline over the past few months. It has embraced almost everyone into an unprecedented crisis and has forced us to go digital. Many small, medium, and large businesses, startups are feeling the pinch in a time when offices are closed and many businesses are on hold or have reduced services. In times like the current pandemic, remote working technologies are acting as a savior in terms of continuity of work.
The dependency over digital infrastructure to keep working during the lockdowns imposed due to the virus has led to the adoption of many new technologies among the industries worldwide. In this pandemic situation, tech developments and improved connectivity might help to stabilize the economic threats posed by COVID-19; on the other hand, cybercriminals around the world undoubtedly are capitalizing on this crisis. The high demand for remote working has also led to new challenges for service providers around latency requirements and data security as phishing attacks and other cybercrimes have gone up since users are accessing networks on their personal devices outside of their organizational setups.
Harikrishna Prabhu, COO at TechnoBind said, With IT becoming the backbone, and the market becoming more competitive than ever, the dependency of new technology has been growing because business associates are finding it the best way to streamline IoT traffic and facilitate real-time, local data analysis. It’s high time that one should embrace the paradigm shift in Information Technology and have an edge on the rising competition.
He further added, Avoiding pop-ups, unknown emails, links, use of strong password protection and two-factor authentication, connection with the secure Wi-Fi, and discussion with the IT department of the company about information security are the simple security practices that one should adopt. In today’s world where technology is at the pace, what I believe is each industry regulatory body should have a robust cybersecurity framework.
The increased use of technologies for working remotely, automation, robotics, remote monitoring tools, and AI by organizations adopting these advanced technologies has caused a significant impact on cybersecurity. The other reason for increasing cybercrime is, people are so much curious to click on the link that highlights Covid-19 or anything related to Coronavirus. 71% of all emails that one receives that say COVID-19 or corona are actually malware or attacks and less than 30% are legitimate.
Tips to avoid cyber attacks during COVID-19:
- It is very important to educate employees on how to secure the data from cyber-attacks. Practice smart password management and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible. One should change their default settings and passwords to reduce the potential impact on their work of an attack via other connected devices. Last but not least, a VPN can be used especially when accessing the internal network to encrypt corporate traffic when using home or public internet.
- All interactions with servers should happen over SSL transmission (TLS 1.2) to ensure the highest level of security. The SSL should terminate only within the cloud service provider network
- All devices that access the cloud-based resources should be subject to advanced endpoint security and one should use complex passwords and should never reuse the old passwords
- Anti-virus products and firewalls are said to be “the guard” of a computer system. It is crucially important to regularly update antivirus and antispyware software on every computer.
- Not every mistake can be undone with ctrl+Z. Never think that ‘it won’t happen to me’ because cybercriminals never discriminate in targeting all sorts of users.
