CYBER SECURITY
VULNERABILITIES AND CYBERATTACKS RISKS under Covid-19 pandemics
information from being intercepted, stolen and used by cyber thieves. Now more than ever, secure connection and encryption technologies are necessary, which many companies, whatever they might be, do not possess because they haven’t had the need to have their employees working remotely.
By Félix Grimán Cybersecurity expert
T
he way business used to run is, right now, forced to change paradigms from those we all knew and dealt with on a day-to-day basis, due to the need of “Social Distancing” provoked by the new virus that is affecting people worldwide and taking more than a quarter million lives around the world. The risk of contagion that a person undergoes, has led to Remote Working, also known as Work From Home, bringing as a first consequence having to access the company's information from places that, in most cases, do not have adequate and/ or standard levels of security, to protect that
24 www.caribbean-maritime.com
COMPANY PREMISES So far, those with adequate levels of security are applied only to safeguard the information within the premises and networks of the company, but not at the workers’ home private LAN through an ISP. This, of course, also includes the shipping industry. Although many shipping companies may have high levels of digital and communication security on their vessels, this is not necessarily the case in offices on the mainland, much less in work spaces outside the technological infrastructure of the business.
First above anything else, shipping companies (all companies to tell the truth), must set a secure connection to their networks, systems and information through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which enables the capacity of any of its employees to connect their computers and systems directly to the company’s networks as if they are physically located at the offices or vessels. In second place, this remote communication needs to be set to use a strong level of encryption to make all the information running through the VPN, as secure and indecipherable as possible, because even when the connection is under the protection of a VPN tunnel, that communication could be sniffed and stolen but, if the thief is not able to decipher what was stolen, everything is an unusable and incomprehensible bunch of nonsense data.
Anyone could ask why all of these security rules are necessary if the company has security staff to avoid any cyber-attack when working remotely
