How Remote Working and Mobile Poses Cybersecurity Concerns

The new norm of remote and hybrid working, as well as mobile devices, is fueling the rise in cyberattacks, raising cybersecurity concerns and requiring organisations to implement best practices to secure these devices.

FREMONT, CA:Keeping cyber criminals out of organisations is not a simple task. However, it was easy in the first phase of digital working where IT security professionals would program technical defences into company PCs and servers. They also trained their staff to follow strict security procedures. These were feasible as security specialists had a degree of control. Employees performed their tasks on approved corporate software and used company-issued laptops staying in the office most of the time.

Swapping company-issued laptops for privately-owned mobile devices and connecting them to cloud-based productivity apps led employees to prefer to work and connect from home networks. This has increased the attack surface available to cyber-attackers and made tasks more difficult.

A recent report highlighted that many organisations experience an unprecedented increase in cyberattacks. Regarding mobile factors, many companies have suffered a compromise involving a mobile device in recent years. Many people prefer to work from home full- or part-time because it improves their work-life balance, but it is bad for enterprise security. Working practice changes have adversely affected their organisation's cybersecurity.

The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) factor is a primary challenge. Securing BYOD devices is more difficult than securing company-owned devices with a mobile device management (MDM) solution in place. Employers had to choose this in the work-from-home era. More than 70 per cent of companies currently use a BYOD policy, and many adopted it during the lockdown. On the other hand, many companies allow employees to use their phones or tablets to access corporate systems and data (BYOD) and let workers access email on their own devices.

Mobile devices were once regarded as resistant to attacks. With new technological advances and features and corporate users following it has decreased the security-first approach. Therefore, corporations are significantly increasingly spending more on cyber-security. Most of this spending was on existing user activities instead of new things.

The availability of applications  for everything has made people’s lives easier, but they also provide an entry point for attackers into different phones. App threats are a contributing factor to mobile-related security breaches. People are tricked into downloading apps filled with malware. There is a considerable increase in organisations experiencing the installation of malware on remote devices. Even non-malicious apps are a threat as they do not require permission sometimes. Criminals often publish harmless free apps requesting access to a camera or microphone and gather sensitive data through it.

As work from home and BYOD becomes the new norm, enterprises are going to deal with these new shifts. They should take significant and simple measures to tighten up their defences and BYOD security.

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