Can you read this article without something buzzing for your attention? It’s unlikely. Working from home (WFH) may have allowed many of us to do our jobs remotely while we wait the pandemic out, but it’s also made us uniquely vulnerable to a constant stream of messages and alerts vying for our attention – something even the World Health Organisation has warned could lead to workplace fatigue. If your colleagues can’t reach you with a mail, they’ll just get you on MS Teams, Zoom, Slack, Telegram or WhatsApp… they may even phone you!
This shift from crowded corporate offices to a WFH environment has seen many companies consider not going back to a traditional way of working at all – with Zoom’s user base already ballooning from 10 million to 200 million active users in less than three months. And then there’s the distraction of social media, schooling-at-home notifications, and community messaging forums. With the boundaries between work-life and home-life blurred, endless alert has made employees feel burdened and burnt out.
But what does that mean when your workforce is dispersed? And is it too simple to assume that all employees can easily – and safely – switch to remote working?
What many people don’t realise is that WFH has had a huge impact on cyber security as people aren’t as careful on their home networks as they are at work. The concept of WFH is now old news, instead now considered to be more realistically “work from anywhere” – effectively eroding the traditional perimeter security that companies once had.
Without the comfortable safety net of the office IT team, employees have been left to defend themselves, leaving multiple entry points open for cyber crime. Cyber criminals are attacking the computer networks and systems of individuals, businesses and global organisations. Barely a day goes by before we hear about another malware variant, zero-day threat or device vulnerability. A high-profile Twitter attack saw celebrities, politicians and billionaires hacked in a crypto-currency scam. Global fitness brand, Garmin, paid millions of dollars in ransom after a cyber attack took many of its products and services offline and many have been left wondering if Intel’s recent data breech is the result of hackers.
The steady increase in cyber security threats that enterprises and organisations now face shows that cyber criminals are not slowing down – they’re exploiting the coronavirus pandemic with everything from phishing e-mails to malicious keyloggers and credential-stealing attacks. They’ve followed employees into their new workplace: the home. And that’s where alert fatigue comes in: how do you get WFH employees to patch security vulnerabilities when they’re faced with numerous other alerts from software updates to banking messages and more? In comparison to large-scale espionage business attacks, the personal consequences of cyber crime are often minimised and sometimes even go unnoticed. WFH employees often don’t realise their personal information is being harvested by malware and sold on the Internet.
The result of a dispersed workforce is that a company’s security risk is that much bigger. For many businesses, previous investments made into cyber security tools will have limited results and offer inconsistent protection. In other words, WFH is a huge opportunity for digital espionage.
Early warnings (yes, alerts!) can be effective when it comes to stopping a WFH cyber attack, or even a malicious e-mail, in its tracks, but being dependant on devices in addition to relying on a home network infrastructure isn’t so simple. For WFH security to work, companies need to adapt their security measures to fit in with the needs of remote teams.
COVID-19 has unexpectedly altered the security landscape. And now, pre-pandemic security software just isn’t enough to prevent and detect attacks without an overload of alerts… alerts which can easily be missed. The solution lies in automatically connecting data across e-mail, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks so that security teams can respond quicker and more confidently.
With XDR, the coronavirus is the only virus that a remote workforce will have to worry about. Trend Micro XDR alleviates the pain and time it takes to identify and investigate threats by using advanced security analytics to detect and track attackers across these data layers. The result? Security teams can respond faster and more confidently. Leave the security alerts to the expert threat hunters, you focus on that WFH-life balance.
Share