With many cyber criminals turning their hacking efforts into home devices that are no longer being protected by your on-premises security solutions, it becomes increasingly important and challenging for enterprises to safeguard against the new wave of threats.

In this article, we will be sharing with you our top 8 tips on how you and your enterprise can protect yourself against work-from-home cyber threats.

1. Do not mix your work computers as personal computers because hackers can compromise your personal accounts and use it to pivot into your critical work data residing in your device. As such, leave your personal accesses to your home devices, and your work accesses to only your work devices.

2. Make sure you have access to your organization’s VPN for secured connection from your home network into your organization’s network. This prevents hackers from tapping into your data. Both your laptops and mobile devices must have VPN-enabled when you are accessing data from your company so that hackers cannot view those sensitive information while the data is in transit.

3. Secure your home Wi-Fi with strong passwords and make sure that there are no other wireless points in your vicinity has the repeated name. If you find repeated access point names, the hackers are setting up fake wireless access points to force your devices to connect to the fake router and can result in compromise of your critical data.

4. Be wary of phishing emails in both your personal and corporate accounts as hackers are now pushing out more phishing attempts. An accidental or innocent click into those links or attachments can allow the hackers to gain full access into your home network.

5. As large chunk of people move into their home network, it can significantly slower down the overall internet speed in your area. Many hackers and scammers are using this opportunity to disguise themselves as telecommunications provider to fix your internet speed so that they can lure you into giving them your usernames, passwords, credit card information and even direct access into your computer.

6. Update all your devices including your network printers, routers, home personal computers as well as your work devices. All a hacker need is an outdated device and they can hack into your home and corporate networks.

7. Change your devices’ default username and password because a lot of the hackers will attempt to login through default credentials to gain access to these devices.

8. Provide your employees with work from home security knowledge so that they can arm themselves against those threats listed above. Here at IBM Security, I will be providing you a free cybersecurity awareness workshop over 30 - 60 minutes for your users so that we can safeguard ourselves against these new wave of threats. 

Title: Cybersecurity Awareness Workshop for Work From Home

Description: Come listen and learn from a Certified Ethical Hacker on how hackers gain access into your home computers, web cameras and many other IT devices while you are working from home. At the same time, learn how to safeguard yourself against such malicious actors by learning the best practises of working from home to protect yourself, your family and your business. 

Agenda:

* How hackers go after work from home computers, mobile devices and web cameras

* Security policies for work from home

* Protect your devices

* Q&A

Speaker’s profile: Loi Liang Yang is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker and CompTIA Security+ cybersecurity consultant. Loi advises large enterprises including multiple fortune 500 companies on security strategy to protect against advanced threats. Loi Liang Yang is also an adjunct lecturer for cyber-security at multiple educational institutions. Mr Loi Liang Yang has more than 4.2 million views and more than 164,000 global subscribers on YouTube through his cyber-security sharing.

Please drop me a private message or email at loily@sg.ibm.com and we will discuss how we can assist you during this period.