Criminals are always ready to exploit headline-grabbing events to trick people into clicking on malicious links or downloading malware-infected attachments.
The worldwide coronavirus pandemic is the latest such event, and it’s having the expected effect: cybercriminals are indeed stepping up their efforts to use the pandemic to prey on the unsuspecting.
The effectiveness of their schemes is being compounded by the fact that so many people are now working from home – people who are doing so without the usual security, planning, and careful deployment done by IT departments beforehand.
It is for this reason that IT decision makers, security experts, and IT administrators need to be aware of, and make use of, cybersecurity best practices regarding remote workers to ensure their employees and their organisations are kept safe in these difficult times.
Working from home IT challenges
When accessing the corporate network from home, the organisation does not have total control over each connection.
Home users can be using their home WiFi networks to connect, which means the security protections in place on the corporate network are not present. The routers they use may also contain unpatched vulnerabilities.
And in the case of employees who do not have company-issued notebooks, they are likely connecting to the corporate network using their personal computers. These are unmonitored, possibly already contaminated with malware, and probably use security software that doesn’t speak to your corporate solution.
Change is coming
While many professionals already worked remotely before the pandemic hit and used company-provided hardware and the proper corporate security measures, as the shift to more people working from home continues, the following changes become more likely:
The computers remote workers use operate well outside the boundaries of the corporate network, leaving the business only protected by the measures already built into those devices.
The security tools that support remote workers may not be able to support the volume of traffic and workloads being sent their way, and services may crash.
IT could become too thinly stretched to be effective as more and more remote support is required.
None of these scenarios are desirable and all can lead to loss of productivity.
You can avoid this. But what if you were already aware of this, and knew how to avoid these circumstances bringing themselves to bear on your business? That is exactly what is possible with a deep knowledge of the best practices you can put in place right now to ensure your company never travels down the road to disaster.
This White Paper from HP delves deeply into the Best Practices you can implement to prevent the worst from happening.
The best practices you’re now aware of make a compelling case to ensure your hardware vendor is on the same page you are when it comes to handling home workers and the IT challenges they raise.
Fortunately, HP’s product stack encompasses everything businesses need to keep their remote staff connected, working, and safe. For instance, HP notebooks have many security technologies built into their hardware that can help to mitigate cybersecurity risks from endpoints joining the corporate network remotely.
HP Sure Click, a feature pre-installed on HP notebooks, opens each browser tab in its own “virtual container”, ensuring malicious phishing links cannot launch their payloads and affect the PC. HP Sure Recover can restore remote PCs in minutes.
HP Sure Sense is an advanced anti-malware technology that leverages AI and machine learning to protect HP PCs and notebooks from known and unknown malware.
All of these are built into the hardware and can be managed remotely with the right tools. They make IT departments’ life much easier and protect the business in the ways that matter.
By choosing a notebook vendor that includes so many security-focused features in all of their business hardware, businesses can easily mitigate the risks of supporting remote workers, and keep their remote workforce connected and working even in the face of significant cybersecurity threats.
Main Image: inc.com