With the COVID pandemic  – many staff have been forced to work from home for the first time. Here are a few tips:

Be on the alert for scams

Hackers are taking the pandemic as an opportunity to target staff working from home as they can be an attractive target.

While working from home you should:

• Be vigilance when answering call, emails and messages.
• Use phishing knowledge techniques to ensure all emails and attachments are valid and not traps.
• If in doubt contact your IT support team.

Encrypted secure remote access

When connecting from home or a cafe – Ensure you are using a secure connection to remote access company networks and resources. Such as:

• An encrypted VPN connection
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
• Remote Desktop
• Enabling 2FA

Security Checklist

When your home office is better secured – following this security checklist:

• Ensure screens are not viewable to anyone but yourself the employee.
• Company data remains on the company cloud rather than the users personal device.
• Ensure home router have a firewall and its enabled and no ports are open.
• When having a break or end of day log out of the business connection.
• If your device is wirelessly connected to make sure your router have suitable security enabled such as WPA2 or WPA3. And your router password is of a decent strength and not printed on the router itself.
• Multi-Factor Authentication has been enabled.
• Public wireless such as a cafe wifi is not used to access work systems. Its best to use a 4G wifi card thats owned by yourself or the company then a public wifi.
• Firmware on network devices is up to date.

Personal Device Checklist

If you are using your own device we highly recommend the following:

• Use the latest most up to date operating system (To read: I’m still on Windows 7 – what should I do?)
• Ensure your device is up to date with Windows security updates.
• Adequate anti-virus software that is kept up to date.
• Have a password screen lock on your PC after a few minutes of non-actively.
• Use a secure VPN to access office network.

Currently we are facing some challenging times due to the COVID pandemic. So we hope these security tips will help you protect your business and staff further.

Related:

• Is your business protected by multi-factor authentication (2FA)? It needs to be
• Phishing scam awareness & staff training
• Tips for protecting your business against phishing scams – PART 1