WORKING REMOTELY
CYBERSECURITY
IN A REMOTE WORKING WORLD When the world became aware of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global lockdowns began, the shift to remote working happened virtually overnight. This obviously created a whole host of new security challenges that had to be overcome.
T
he difference between February of 2020 – when most business users sat behind a corporate firewall all the time, with very few remote users operating – and March, when the largest majority of users were suddenly working from home, was enormous. According to Ralph Berndt, director: Sales and Marketing at Syrex, a provider of remote solutions, this opened a whole new angle of attack for cybercriminals. He notes that from the outset, slews of bot emails were sent out with the aim of compromising users whose home environments were far less secure than their corporate one. “People were bombarded with spoof mails designed to compromise their
42
C YB E R S E C U R I T Y 2 0 2 2
security, many playing on the fears of the then unknown virus and the thirst for information about the global crisis,” he explains. “The criminals knew most users were in a position where they were unlikely to be able to afford to run their own virtual private network (VPN), so they conducted massive email campaigns trying to compromise users in order to gain access to their corporate networks.” Ultimately, says Berndt, it came down to how prepared organisations were for remote work. Moreover, while the mass move to remote work demonstrated the importance of tackling SA’s connectivity issues, it also showed how vital it was to be able to securely access critical systems that were still on-premises. This led to a knee-jerk reaction from many companies to obtain more VPN licences, in order to be able to authenticate large numbers of users.
A new dynamic “The rise of collaboration software also created a whole new dynamic in terms of how business was done, but while the ability to collaborate with and share information among employees was wonderful, the pandemic also forced the development of such tools at a rapid pace. Years were shaved off the adoption timetable, and although a straightforward Teams or Zoom call was less of a security challenge, anything involving the sharing
of documents, screens or data was a target for the bad guys.” “One thing we definitively noticed was a rise in website honeycombing, which is when duplicate websites that look similar to the real one are created to fool people into going to these compromised sites.” Another security challenge he highlights was the rise in manipulated invoices and bank information. He explains that an increasing number of invoices were illegally manipulated to convince finance departments to release payments they were not supposed to. This, he adds,
KEY FINDINGS FROM THE CITRIX THE STATE OF SECURITY IN A HYBRID WORLD REPORT 2021 • O ver half of global businesses have reimagined their businesses • W ork from anywhere is here to stay • T echnology response has been swift • S ecurity and the employee experience can’t be separated • N ew protocols enhanced employee experience and increased productivity • K nowledge workers embrace the notion of security as shared responsibility
