7 Ways to Reduce Cyber Threats From Remote Workers

Offer periodic awareness training: To avoid breaches, employers need to implement employee training courses with a focus on the latest threat scenarios. Management, operations, and R&D are all prime targets of social engineering, phishing, and scamming campaigns (among other threats). Employees need to be aware of the threats they face to take the necessary measures to protect themselves, their devices, and sensitive company information.

Share lessons learned: Companies should implement periodic reviews of employees' and executives' experiences in dealing with phishing and other social engineering tactics. Listening to colleagues' experiences and "lessons learned" helps all personnel better identify and protect themselves from threats. As a result of these lessons, management should establish clear policies and procedures — with clear owners and defined responsibilities — to ensure home office security.

Harden endpoint devices: Before allowing employees to connect to the office remotely, organizations need to guide them on enforcing all related company policies and procedures with the updated threat landscape, including laptops and routers connecting from home offices and mobile devices.

Enforce home-based VPN connections: Given that home networks are generally easier to breach than office networks, organizations need to enforce employees' use of VPN connections when working remotely. VPNs encrypt and protect data, ensuring that the connection remains private and secure.

Implement multifactor authentication (MFA): Single-factor authentication is associated with the vast majority of compromised user accounts. In fact, implementing MFA could prevent up to 99.9% of such attacks. While results may vary for different companies, there's no question that MFA — requiring two or even three levels of authentication for more sensitive assets — would greatly reduce an organization's vulnerability.

Separate the security organization: In many companies, cybersecurity is an IT department's responsibility and competes for attention with other IT issues. Companies should establish a security operations center (SOC) that is dedicated specifically to cyber defense and can monitor events, update security controls, and defend against attacks more effectively. The SOC can also monitor threats, scan the Dark Web for data breaches, and better protect company and employee information.

Establish an intelligent perimeter defense: Organizations need to take a thorough inventory of their assets, vulnerabilities, and methods of defense. IT is spread across servers, cloud installations, and now home endpoints. Organizations need to inventory these connections to locate the weak points and defend against potential threats by implementing security measures that mandate that only certain organizational assets can be accessed outside the office.