Given unprecedented worldwide health–safety issues due to COVID-19, people are actively practicing social distancing, leading to more and more employees working from home.
Remote working is nothing new, but given the short notice and the numbers of new remote workers, organizations face a myriad of cybersecurity risks and challenges.
From the first instance that news hit about COVID-19, opportunists attempted to take advantage of the situation, initially playing on people’s fears regarding the Coronavirus itself.
Related: Growth of Coronavirus Themed Cyberattacks
Now, given the increase of new, at-home employees and remote workers in general, cybercriminals are also given more opportunities to exploit inadequate or lacking IT resources.
Scammers prey on vulnerability, and this workforce transformation produces many threat vectors for hackers to worm their way into any network.
These susceptible paths include:
This is, in fact, what recently happened to Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio, hit with ransomware days after switching to online-only classes.
Unfortunately, training and IT support are tougher for remote workers and both are needed now, more than ever.
Every organization and its employees need to ensure they are ready and able to adjust to the new work environment.
The first step should be to slow down and create a checklist of things to do before work can start at home.
Conduct a risk and cost assessment to understand if it is feasible or possible.
Organizations must also:
Employees must:
Many organizations can navigate the sudden move to remote work successfully by insuring communication remains open, accessible and secure both internally with staff, and externally with third parties.
Secure email for modern healthcare: Start Your Free Trial
The original version of this page was published at: https://www.paubox.com/blog/cybersecurity-challenges-of-remote-working
Paubox Marketing is an email marketing platform built for healthcare. Our solution allows healthcare organizations to securely send PHI in marketing emails to drive more engagement and grow busines... Read more
Personalized email marketing can be an effective tool for healthcare providers to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and grow their businesses, and Paubox Marketing is the perfect ...read more
Yesterday (3/17/20), the U.S. Federal Government and the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) announced immediate changes to laws concerned with telehealth services.The idea ...read more
If you are a healthcare organization, you are familiar with HIPAA. For every patient you treat, you must abide by HIPAA to protect his or her protected health information (PHI).But ...read more
At our recent virtual healthcare cybersecurity conference, Paubox SECURE @ Home, Hoala Greevy, Paubox’s founder and CEO, and Nick Wong, software developer at Paubox, discussed ...read more
Ask a Healthcare Lawyer: HIPAA Compliance for Healthcare Marketers
Your FAQs...Answered!