By 2025, 32.6 million Americans are estimated to work remotely. Additionally, 73% of executives believe employees who work remotely present more cyber security risks to their organizations.
If your company has remote employees, this may seem alarming; however, we’ve compiled the best cybersecurity tips for remote security you can use to protect your organization from remote cyber threats. Below, we’ll explore these best practices and how you can integrate them into your daily operations.
Why Remote and Hybrid Teams Are at Risk
Hybrid teams, where your organization is working both remotely and in a physical office space, present a common vulnerability for many businesses: lack of understanding and communication.
When an entire team works in one location, an employee is more likely to reach out in person to double-check with their coworkers about any unusual activity. Hybrid teams are often working asynchronously, so it’s vital they have an in-depth understanding of the security protocols and procedures to prevent data loss and theft as well as maintain consistent communication across departments.
5 Remote Work Security Best Practices
1. Implement Cyber Security Awareness Training
It’s commonly accepted that employees are considered the weakest link when it comes to cybersecurity. This is often true, but only if those employees are untrained. Those who are empowered to spot cyber threats can be your most effective defense against remote cyber threats.
While some organizations have basic security awareness training in place, many of these programs are either outdated, not utilized consistently enough, or are too basic to help employees adequately.
Ensure you provide the latest cyber security training and knowledge for your employees to maintain a strong security posture.
2. Educate Employees About Common Threat Actor Techniques
One of the easiest and most common ways threat actors gain the information they need to infiltrate organizations is through employees who unknowingly leak important data.
Of the risks associated with working from home, social engineering attacks are at the top of the list. The average social engineer is simply a con artist as opposed to a technical genius. Most social engineering attacks don't require the use of advanced technology. Instead, they focus on targeting employees who are not properly educated on remote work security best practices.
Even posting certain information on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook about an organization can help social engineers in the OSINT phase of an attack. Employees should be aware of the types of calls and emails that an attacker may send to gather information about their organization to best ensure remote security.
3. Constantly Communicate
Often, employees are completely unaware of the current state of your cyber security protections — especially when working remotely away from the natural buzz around the office. To them, IT takes care of all security, and more often than not, no news is good news. But waiting until your organization has been breached isn’t the best time to begin informing your team of your cybersecurity status.
Make your company’s cyber security an internal affair by regularly sharing the state of your protection measures. Task department leaders with relaying updates and news about any changes or developments on their meeting agendas, as a once-a-month check-in.
You could also add any updates about your cyber security to your employee newsletter, giving your team just another place to go for updates. Your newsletter may also be a good place to share a relevant cyber security article or awareness resource without needing to force staff to subscribe to unwanted blogs or email drips.
4. Utilize Microlearning
Your employees are busy, and sometimes it’s hard to ask them to set aside a few hours to learn about cyber security. It can be even harder to engage remote workers, who have their own set of distractions at home.
Help your team learn with a different kind of security awareness training — the Mitnick Security approach.
We offer one to two-minute microlearning video lessons, interactive lessons, and episode-based, Netflix-like shows to cater to different learning styles and keep the attention of your team.
Dive even deeper by requiring a more extensive formal training program, complete with certifications. These lesson plans and tests could be something your team does every six months or each year to ensure they’re staying up-to-date on the latest cyber threats — which are always evolving.
5. Put Proper Safeguards in Place
A major misconception among end-users is that they are safe to work anywhere as long as they use their corporate devices. However, the corporate network infrastructure, such as hardware firewalls and honeynets, won't protect users when working remotely.
Security professionals and IT staff should implement processes to prevent a single user from fulfilling a potentially harmful social engineering request, such as a wire transfer or direct deposit change. By implementing a dual-approval strategy or multi-factor authentication, more than one set of eyes must review the request before authorization is granted. This type of process increases the chances of a malicious request being flagged before it is completed.
Perform Regular Internal Cyber Security Testing
Keep cyber security at the forefront of your employees’ minds by testing them frequently. This could be secret screening like penetration testing or social engineering strength testing to test your staff during their everyday work. With this option, you can privately pull offenders aside and help educate them about the threats they fell victim to.
Strengthen Your Entire Organization With the Top Cyber Security Resources
These are just a few vital remote work security best practices to improve your cyber security. While employees may not be protected by physical security equipment outside of the office walls, there are some quick techniques that businesses can use for improved remote security, such as:
- Educating users about two-factor authentication
- Improving password security and management
- Providing instructions for using your company's VPN
- Keeping onboarding and offboarding in mind
To fortify every aspect of your business, our all-in-one guide, 5 ½ Steps to Avoiding Cyber Threats, will give you and your employees the most advanced cybersecurity tips, techniques, steps, and more.
Download your free copy of 5 ½ Steps to Avoiding Cyber Threats today.
