Increasing Cybersecurity Challenges in WFH

Working from home can be great for work-life balance, flexibility, and the lack of a commute, but it also brings up a whole host of cybersecurity problems. With employees relying on personal networks and sometimes their personal devices, new online tools and services, and added distractions, it has become a nightmare for an IT team to regulate security measures. The shift to remote working during the pandemic coincided with a significant rise in cybersecurity incidences as criminals sought to take advantage of both the stress and disruption of the pandemic and the increased "attack surface" available to target.

Amongst 268 responses, 48.5% of respondents agreed that their company was prepared for Work From Home cybersecurity challenges.  26.5 % of people responded that their company was not ready for such cybersecurity challenges and the remaining 25% are not sure about their company being prepared for WFH cybersecurity challenges.

To overcome the challenges, data protection is crucial and when asked what steps their company took to protect employees' or organizational data, the highest number of respondents said that their organization implemented Remote Work Access (implemented measures to ensure that their employees' home networks are protected by VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) followed by Data breach incident monitoring and Internal privacy policy with 23.7% and 22% of votes simultaneously. 18.6% voted to state that their organization opted for a backup policy and surprisingly, Multi-factor authentication was last with 8.5% votes. 

As many offices are still working on hybrid or work-from-home patterns, it becomes difficult to have control over the data. In this context, the survey shows that 60.3% voted to say employees working from home with less supervision and fewer technical controls make the system vulnerable. Whereas, 30.9% disagree with others and 8.8% are not sure about it.