As more employees are working from home during this pandemic, it’s a great time to review basic IT Security knowledge across your company. In this break from office life, many are finding down time between tasks that was not there before. This presents an opportunity for personal development, and a good review of IT Security best practices should be at the top of that list.
- Beware of phishing emails in times of crisis. Criminals use times like these to prey on our emotions. When there is news of a large security breach, other criminals will send phishing emails pretending to be a credit monitoring service. When there is a natural disaster in the news, criminals will use that news to solicit fake aid packages. Now with the Coronavirus, hospitals are already seeing phishing attacks pretending to be from the CDC. With the government response, and aid packages, we look for hackers to also prey on citizens trying to access the stimulus.
- Now is a good time to change the default password on your home Wi-Fi router. The password should follow our password guidelines below. Also, avoid using public Wi-Fi while working remotely. Public Wi-Fi opens up many more unknown variables than your home Wi-Fi network.
- Use this time to update passwords on critical accounts. Remind employees they should not re-use passwords, or worse, use passwords also used on personal services. This would also be a good time for businesses to require more complex passwords for business accounts. Quanexus recommendation for password management:
Passwords should be 25 characters long and contain at least one letter, one number, and one symbol. The words used in passwords should not be in the dictionary. Users should not re-use passwords on other platforms.
- Make sure systems are patched and updated. If your employees are working from home on company laptops, this is a critical time to make sure all systems are up to date. Working from home opens up more security risks than normal, patching and updating is the first line of defense against those threats.
This is the time to stay vigilant, and remind employees that criminals are trying to use this change to take advantage of people and businesses.
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