Common Cybersecurity Attacks That Happen in a Remote Work Environment

Nowadays, cases of advanced cybersecurity issues are on the rise leading to data loss in so many organizations. Most remote employees unknowingly put the company’s data at risk. Data breaches may happen when sending emails, instant messages to the clients, or uploading documents to the cloud.

While working remotely may increase flexibility and enhance work-life balance, it may host many harmful activities like identity theft. Below are the common cybersecurity attacks that happen in a remote work environment.

Phishing schemes

Phishing schemes are processes that may trick remote employees into giving either their personal or the organization’s information. They are one of the biggest threats to the network’s security. Remote employees may unknowingly follow the worst security practices and end up giving hackers access to the company’s network.

Most phishing schemes involve posing as a legitimate entity, usually through email, to gather credentials about the company. The different companies must train their employees on the current vishing prevention tips to ensure that their data is safe. Inspired eLearning offers the best security awareness and compliance eLearning training solutions that will help protect the firm from cyber-attacks.

Denial of service

This type of cybersecurity attack floods your working computer or network and makes it impossible to transmit requests. In most cases, service denial attacks come from a computer network of different hackers. At first, the attackers will use the “handshake” process, among other techniques, and deploy a DoS that will trigger a crash of the machine. 

In some cases, a DDoS sends malware to different systems and controls all these systems from a common point. These common points are in different places and are difficult to trace. In most cases, the organization ends up losing hope in tracking them. That’s why it’s vital not to relax when working from a remote area.

Man-in-the-middle

It’s a cybersecurity attack where the attackers interrupt an existing conversation between the remote workers and the company. Man-in-the-middle is commonly referred to as eavesdropping, and it can lead to a lot of data loss by the company. The attacker will pretend to be a legitimate participant of the organization.

Man-in-the-middle may happen in different areas where the organization is hosting its services. That may be in email, web browsing, and social media. During the process, the traffic is filtered and the data stolen by using malicious software to provide the information on the other hand.

Malware

Malware may be a file or code that infects and steals remote workers’ data when delivered over the internet. It conducts everything that the intended attacker wants to achieve in the organization. With numerous methods that can be used to infect computer systems, malware may come in different forms that are hard to interpret. 

Suppose the remote employee clicks on the infected link. In that case, a dangerous malware program is installed on the computer systems to block access to the critical network components before an attack is fully launched. Malware also works by transmitting data in different hard drives to be needed for malicious processes.

Insider threats

Dealing with remote employees sometimes can be very difficult. When threatened with eviction due to poor work, some may even misuse access to the organization’s data systems. On the other hand, careless employees may not comply with the firm’s rules and policies that may trigger insider threats. Apart from remote employees, business partners may take advantage of working remotely to invertedly email data with phishing links.  

These actions may expose the organization’s data to hackers who may shut down the organization’s systems. Organizations need to keep track of the employees and business partners who intentionally avoid security measures to be more productive.