5 Ways to Keep Remote Teams Secure
Never in the history of the digital age has ensuring your staff’s ability to securely work from home been so crucial. The Covid-19 pandemic has officially changed work culture and taken professionals from the office to the comfort of their own homes. In doing so, companies have to consider the best tactics to make remote work secure.
1. Make Sure Your Company Has a Cybersecurity Policy
Some employees may not know how important cybersecurity is for their personal and professional information. Team members might assume that if they are not working from the office or dealing directly with consumer data, they are not at risk for cyber threats – which is not true. So, make sure your company has a foolproof cybersecurity policy that all employees are fully knowledgeable about and can implement confidently when working remotely.
2. Expand Network Protection
The top risk factor for companies with a remote workforce is the use of low-security internet connections. Now that pandemic restrictions are lifting, remote employees can work from cafes or other public Wi-Fi networks. However, Public Wi-Fi poses a high risk for malicious activity.
Live your best life while sipping on your Starbucks, but use a virtual private network (VPN) while doing it. Using a VPN before signing on to a public Wi-Fi network will encrypt internet traffic and monitor for cyber threats.
3. Make Sure You Are Sending Encrypted Emails
96% of malware is delivered through email, according to the 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. It’s vital to ensure that sensitive information is secure when sent via email so that your employees have the highest level of protection against malware and phishing attacks. The best way to do this is by using a solution for threat protection that will curtail these attempts right away. The solution would automatically detect and prevent the infected emails from being delivered to the user’s inbox.
Sending an encrypted email is essentially like covering an important gift in bubble wrap – you know your recipient will get it, but you want to make sure it’s not broken when they do.
4. Utilize Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
While there is no foolproof way to keep cyberattackers away, you can make it harder for them to succeed in obtaining your sensitive information with Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). 2FA adds an extra layer of protection on top of passwords for both your employee and your business.
Every professional has received an email from their company IT person asking them to complete the 2FA process for their work email account. Usually, there’s a follow-up email because Sally and Harry from marketing think it’s a hassle, and eventually, the IT person calls or asks for a personal Zoom meeting to rectify the matter. All this is done to ensure that their company’s remote team is secure. So, while a password may be compromised, the other authentication factors will not likely be.
5. Make Sure Your Encrypted Emails are Also Spoof-Proof
Email spoofing is a technique used in spam and phishing attacks to trick users into thinking a message came from a person or company they probably already trust. In spoofing attacks, the sender creates a fake email header with the fraudulent sender address, which most users don’t question. This means that the company’s reputation is at risk.
One way to make sure this doesn’t happen is by using a protocol of Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). Unauthenticated messages will be rejected and in the spam folder before they can do any harm.
