How To Close Cybersecurity Gaps Created By The Pandemic

Since the coronavirus pandemic forced employees to work from home, employers need to consider new cybersecurity challenges. As your employees work from home, they are potential victims of cyberattacks. If your business neglects the risk of cybersecurity, cybercriminals can easily disrupt your business operations. Furthermore, they will access critical information and use it against your business. In this article, you will learn some effective techniques to mitigate the risk of cybersecurity and take precautionary measures.

1. Risk Assessment

When you understand the loopholes or gaps, you can create a retention plan. When your employees work remotely, you’re at the risk of cybersecurity threats. Therefore, you must conduct a risk assessment within your workspace. You can either hire a professional team for risk identification or perform it all alone. Your goal is to ensure maximum security for your business. This security health check includes evaluation of network connections, hardware devices, IT components and policies, and most importantly, storage. If you identify any vulnerabilities, you can enhance security levels by creating a roadmap to close cybersecurity gaps created by the pandemic.

2. Network Architecture

Many businesses have an open floor plan wherein their employees can move through the doors without restrictions. These doors are firewalls and routers. Because of this flat network, any threat can move around computers and search for valuable data. Once they gather this important information, they can attack. However, you can prevent this from happening by transferring your systems to the segmented network. These networks create additional security by locking the rooms or establishing sub-networks. Because of that, the threat cannot roam around in search of sensitive data. Routers and firewall will block their access to other devices.

3. Password Strategy

Passwords can be the weakest link in your cybersecurity. If your passwords are simple, cybercriminals can easily breach your security. Due to the pandemic, companies are shifting to cloud networks. Cloud services may look safe, but they cause numerous threats as well.

Moreover, password-based identity management solutions can cause challenges for your remote workers. They may find it hard to access business applications. To prevent any loophole in your cybersecurity, you should consider multi factor authentication. In this method of security, your employees should pass through more than one verification method to prove their identity. For instance, you can include PIN, fingerprint, and security tokens. Cybercriminals will find it difficult to breach this type of security.

4. Awareness Programs

Besides taking security measures, it is essential to train your employees, so they’re aware of the best security practices. When users have little or no knowledge about security, they can fall victim to spearfishing emails at home. Also, their children may access the work computer and visit websites that can potentially breach the network. This makes cybersecurity awareness crucial. Security awareness programs will guide employees about different types of scamming techniques they might encounter on a daily basis.

Conclusion

Once you create a perfect line of defense against cyberattacks, you must quickly evaluate the system and identify gaps. Cybercriminals use different techniques to breach system securities. Therefore, continue updating your system software as developers introduce new security features in updated versions.