Throughout the recent developments, the team at borwell and cybx have been hard at work ensuring appropriate business continuity and resilience are in place to facilitate remote working capabilities while keeping business as close to usual as possible. As part of this, we are sharing some of the best tips to make sure that you that you are able to maintain your usual business activities and communication, despite having to work more remotely.
When working from home, your staff members do not typically have the same assurance process to mitigate security threats. Threat actors are beginning to target businesses who are moving to a more remote working style and hoping for a higher success rate as these emails might not be flagged in the same manner as they usually are within the business.
Our tips to stay safe when working remotely are:
Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) if your business has one available. This will encrypt your traffic in one of two ways. Both have their own benefits, and this encryption is paramount to protect data when it is transmitted, especially if you are dealing with business-sensitive, financial, personal or sensitive information:
Full-Tunnel: All of your traffic is encrypted, regardless of where it is sent or retrieved from
Split-Tunnel: All traffic between your endpoint and your office network is encryptedRegularly train your staff members on how to identify potential threats, how to work safely, and how to practice good cyber hygiene. This is especially important when they are working remotely and rely on intuition when communication is not fully available.
Assess your surroundings when answering and dealing with calls that involve personal information. This is important at all times, but especially important when working remotely when you are not always alone.
If you work in finance, confirm banking details before sending any payments. Send a nominal payment before the full amount. A small fee (e.g. £1.33) to clarify the recipient is correct is better to lose over a £50,000 payment.
Have a sanity check of all devices before giving the final go-ahead for your staff to work from home. Check that their firewalls are enabled, their anti-malware is active and up-to-date, and ensure that they have limited, but not restrictive permissions. Think “Need to Know” before providing access.
Keep your eyes peeled for another blog soon to be published on our website. We will provide more guidance for businesses who are looking at moving over to a work-from-home business style in the coming weeks!