3 Ways to Arm Your Organization Against These Cyber Threats

With the global workforce going remote to stay connected—everything is changing—including Cybersecurity threats. A fresh set of security risks is coming fast, with bad actors looking for new ins with more employees working remotely.

Security is a growing concern for IT teams as team members are remote and online. A study showed 86% of business leaders had questions about securing business data and remote workers. And with new pressures on organizations and team members, users are more vulnerable now than even a few weeks ago.

Approaches to securing the remote workforce are changing daily, with new threats coming into focus. Hackers are even crashing confidential conference calls, targeting the growing number of companies using conferencing tools like Zoom.

Having the right security strategy has never been more important to your organization.

Here are a few ways to protect your organization against the latest security threats.

1. Run a virtual security training.

Make it mandatory and explain the newest threats to your team and how to counter them with basics like VPN, using their Single Sign-On, and reporting any emails to your IT team that doesn’t look right. Why? Spam filters aren’t catching everything. In fact, spear phishing messages have an open rate 5-6x higher than actual marketing emails—70% of employees fall for them.

And that number is increasing with more people working remotely and more receptive to communications from people they don’t know.

Your virtual training should highlight SMiShing—these attacks via text can become more familiar as people looking to connect through current events. Your team members should be on the lookout for suspicious text messages coming—targeting employees’ personal information and account numbers.

2. Test your workforce with a simulated phishing campaign.

The best way to see where you need to improve and push more education is to see what details employees provide that they shouldn’t. Send simulated messages to your workforce leveraging recent events to see how they react. These test runs immediately identify areas where additional training is required and any holes missing in your security policy.

After every training, use another simulation to gauge your team’s company’s progress so you can catch these vulnerabilities before they become active issues.

3. Implement your remote security strategy.

Cyberattacks and social engineering are powerful tools because too many employees aren’t on guard or aware of the importance of data security—even more than usual when they’re dealing with stressors outside of work. It’s absolutely critical to educate your team members on how you are securing them and the business and on the role they play.

Build or finetune your Cybersecurity policy for remote workers. Explain why you’re introducing the policy—the kinds of new emerging threats—and how they can keep the business secure while they work from home. Guide your teams through the high-level details before sending the strategy out to all employees to review and sign.

When you create your policy, make sure you start it with a mission statement (the why) and then distill it to the specifics of security policies across all devices—personal and company-owned.

After launching your security policy, reinforce why compliance is critical and how you support compliance with tech, coaching, and other resources with regular communications.