Jaylen Santana                                                                                                            April 18, 2021

Bus 311                                                                                                                       Prof. Buckler

Cyber Risk Management

It is no secret that COVID-19 has taken its toll on the world and continues to take a toll on the world. Within businesses we have seen that many of them have had to go remote in order to safely continue operating which in and of itself has brought about its own complications. A major issue that businesses have now had to worry about more than ever is a cyber incident which could be extremely damaging to a company if the cybersecurity risks are neglected.

The restrictions that have been imposed by governments in response to the coronavirus pandemic encouraged employees to work from home, or better yet stay at home. As a direct consequence of this, technology has now more than ever become important to both our working and personal lives alike. Despite the drastic need for technology, many companies still do not provide a cyber safe working environment. Reported figures from the June 2020 NCSC (National Cyber Security Center) showed that there were 350 reported cases of cyberattacks which included phishing, fraudulent web sites, direct attacks on companies, etc. in April compared to the norm of 100-150. The pandemic alongside the increase in working from home were seen as a major cause of this increase.

Cyber-attackers see the pandemic as an opportunity to really put their criminal activity into overdrive by using the vulnerability of employees working from home and capitalizing on people’s strong interest of coronavirus-related news such as fake coronavirus related websites. It is also important to consider that the average cost of a data breach resulting from remote working could be as much as $137,000. On July 8^th, the City of London Police reported that January 2020 more than 11 million dollars had been lost due to COVID-19 scams and in Switzerland, 1 in 7 respondents to a survey had experienced a cyberattack during the pandemic period. This becomes apparent when you bring up the fact that 47% of individuals fall for a phishing scam while working at home.

How companies can prevent these cyberattacks from occurring include providing employees with a license to antivirus and malware software for use on their personal computers which does not provide fail safe protection, but it eliminates many low-level attacks. Another way that companies can prevent cyber-attacks from occurring include cyber security and phishing awareness which implies that staff should be briefed on the best practices and procedures to regulate the sending of emails or other content to private email addresses and checking the authenticity of the sender’s addresses when receiving emails. Some more advanced measures that can that companies can take include applying new technology and tools such as host checking (a tool to check the security posture of an endpoint before authorizing access to corporate information systems) to reinforce the security of remote working and intelligence techniques meaning businesses should encourage the use of cyber threat intelligence to identify relevant indicators of attacks and address known attacks.

As for my willingness to work at an organization I think that due to these new threats I am going to stay away from big companies or organizations because its personally makes me feel uneasy and unsafe knowing that most companies are not equipped to handle many cyber-attacks. On the other hand, I think it is good that the pandemic has brought light to the cyber security issues that companies have had but had not put much focus into since before going remote.