With the rise in the number of cyberattacks during this global pandemic crisis, organizations are fighting battles at two fronts; one at the health frontier and the other one at the economic frontier. Disruption in business operations is one of the reasons for the economic crisis, but now there is another big problem marching towards the organizations, i.e., the proliferating recent cyber attacks 2020. So, how can an organization safeguard itself in such a situation? One of the most potent antidotes to fight a cyber attack today is heightened cybersecurity awareness by employees.
The social engineering attacks are the most recent cyber attacks 2020 that are defrauding employees who are working remotely in this COVID-19 outbreak. The most effective option to remediate such a situation is increasing threat awareness amongst employees. The organization must train the employees to take the following precautions:
- Think before clicking and carefully examining the links or attachments in an email sent by an unknown sender or an email which do not directly communicate with you.
- Avoid sending suspicious emails to your colleagues or co-workers.
- Ensure that the email is from an authentic source. To check the actual source of the link, you can hover the cursor at the web address in the “to” or “from” fields. Also, check the email address for any type of character change. Usually, scammers use similar-looking domain names (similar to legitimate entities) to trick the users.
- Check for grammatical mistakes in the content of the email. Legitimate organizations usually don’t make any grammatical mistakes while sending an email to the user. So, if there are any grammatical errors, then it is a clear sign of fraud.
- If you come across any email which looks suspicious to you, then report the sceptical email to the IT or security department.
- To make sure that nothing malicious or unknown enters you’re your mailbox, it will be an excellent option to install anti-phishing and anti-virus software as well as filters on the browsers. The software scans every email and attachments before it enters your mailbox.
- Scammers are nowadays creating fraudulent charities in the name of COVID-19 donations. So, if you get a link in an email for making donations, never donate a single penny via that link. It will be wise to directly visit the charity website to make your contribution directly.
There are several other measures that an organization can take to fight against recent cybersecurity attacks:
- Update Remote Access Management Policy As Well As Procedures: To safeguard the employees working from home, the organization should do the implementation of multifactor authentication for accessing the VPN. In addition to this, the policy should include
- rules relating to IP address whitelisting,
- user limits should be there on the remote desktop protocol access,
- and there should be proper scrutiny of remote network connections.
- Response Plan To Tackle Phishing Attacks: The organization should learn from its previous experiences of the cyberattack simulations and create a response plan that fixes the loopholes in the previous security system.
- Strengthening Security Perimeters: The organization itself should detect the vulnerabilities in its system before any cyber attacker penetrates the system by taking advantage of such vulnerabilities. For doing so, an organization can employ advanced security solutions that conduct continuous testing and monitoring of security controls and detects any type of loopholes. It will ensure the organization’s minimum exposure to any recent cybersecurity attack.
- Reinforcing Endpoint Protection: Since most of the employees are remotely working to follow social distancing norms in this coronavirus crisis, device protection becomes essential. Make sure that the employees do not use their personal laptops for doing organizational work. Organizations should provide them laptops that are protected with tested security software for safeguarding the system against advanced malware. The organizations can even employ a broader detection and monitoring program to effectively patch the devices against any cyberattack.
In the COVID-19 crisis, such situations arose in front of all the organizations in which they had to shift to the telecommuting workforce. Such a crucial transition of workforce to a remote working model also gave rise to data security issues. To patch such security issues, for fighting against recent cyber attacks 2020, employees and organizations have to work together. Additionally, organizations should deploy risk management as well as fraud management teams to strengthen the defense mechanism for the detection and monitoring of any malicious activity.