One of the biggest cybersecurity threats to any organization are its employees. The positive side to this is when an organization proactively utilizes network security to protect the organization, through employees, as a human firewall of defense. The trend is now companies shifting to a remote workforce, and obviously so do employee work patterns, and technology adoption.

Unfortunately, due to coronavirus impacts these technology changes are made under pressure with limited resources, and staff to properly anticipate or track risk against regulatory and compliance requirements by poorly stored data.

The best time to assess your organizations cyber hygiene and cloud security is now, right now. 

Changes to the network perimeter are also ripe to create unanticipated threats, as a higher burden is placed on remote access systems, and when not correctly implemented exposes systems to the risks of the internet. 

Sophisticated cyber attacks target remote employees by threat actors, who use social media to study and entice employees, by email or call and pretend to be co-workers seeking passwords or other company assets.  

A lack of an effective IT strategy, communication and security awareness training, with continuous testing of systems and employees, exposes your organization to social engineering and data breach risks.

Do you know what software and tools your employees are downloading to work computers? 

Shadow IT, an information technology term that refers to applications and infrastructure that are managed and utilized without the enterprise’s IT department.  Consider the sources, and how employee activity and new software could impact the company network and business compliance requirements.

Outdated code and unpatched software are other common security threats that should seem easy enough to assess and repair. However, a lack of continuity in IT processes, implementations, limited budgets and overworked staff can impact staying current with security risks and regulation standards.

Many companies use remote desktop protocol to remotely access systems and servers. RDP enables IT departments to more easily manage Windows systems, but poorly secured or unprotected endpoints provide easy access for hackers.

In the past month, a reported 41.5% spike in “the number of devices exposing RDP to the internet via RDP’s default TCP port 3389.” As reported by the founder of Shodan, an internet of things device search engine company.

Criminals have a wide variety of tools and methods to take advantage of personal information to access your network, whether for extortion, ransomware or data theft. The threat landscape has grown with untrained and overwhelmed employees combined with remote work conditions in this new era of doing business.

Effective security measures and consistent communication within your organization is critical now more than ever. A robust cybersecurity program has become a condition of doing business as clients, vendors, suppliers and industry regulations are driving compliance. Abacode can help you reduce complexity, vendor fatigue and knowledge gaps that may exist in your organization. 

Call Abacode and ask how our Tele-Cyber Program can help your organization identify weaknesses of your external environment with remote vulnerability scans to set a plan for remediation.  We offer vCISO consultation, employee security awareness training and 24/7/365 Endpoint Managed Detection and Response.  Abacode.com