The past 12 months reoriented daily life in myriad ways. This is represented most starkly in how we work. In 2020, 62 percent of Americans worked from home, with 49 percent doing so for the first time, reports business website B2C.
That high volume of employees in the United States taking their work laptops home and from brought with it a 300 percent increase in cybercriminal activity targeting remote workers. The frequency of these hacks increased during the first six weeks of American quarantine and shelter-in-place orders early last spring.
The business website reports that 20 percent of companies experienced data breaches linked to these home-based workers.
If you’re a business owner — or even just an employee who still sees your home as your “office” for the foreseeable future — it is understandable that numbers like this give you cause for concern. With cybercrime targeting work from home on the rise, one bright spot appears to be the reality that cybersecurity etiquette is also on the rise.
Best practices for keeping your personal and professional data secure are part of the normalized parlance of office conversation. Now, it is becoming second nature for American workers to be cognizant of the importance of keeping their information protected from hackers.
Two-factor authentication, secure passwords, and wariness over phishing and ransomware attacks are increasingly a normalized part of professional life. In short, protecting your data isn’t just reserved for the company’s IT team.
CFO reports that companies are relying on the cloud. One example is the fact that organizations are using cloud-located intranets that use direct, private connections and even virtual desktop interfaces.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are also playing a needed role in identifying threats.
CFO cites a recent Infosecurity Magazine piece that shows how machine learning is detecting phishing attacks, referencing a cloud-based algorithm that scans email header messages to pinpoint what is known as “ratware,” or software that generates automatic mass messages. Then, another algorithm looks for phishing vocabulary in the body of an email. Eventually, this algorithm continues to grow more sophisticated, better picking up on suspicious emails as it collects more information about what is and isn’t malicious information hitting your Inbox.
While the rise of cybercrime is worrying, there is reason to hope. The deployment of canny AI made specifically to fight back against hackers coupled with increased cybersecurity literacy among America’s workforce hints at a future primed for a world that will continue to rely on working from home — safely.