What is the impact of a dispersed workforce on your business?
Homeworking, social distancing, and self-quarantine may help to mitigate the risk of coronavirus taking hold within a workforce, but each introduces practical challenges and raises questions and risks of its own. Concurrent demand on remote access solutions will impact capacity in terms of bandwidth, licenses, and hardware. There is also a risk that as capacity is stretched, mistakes will happen, or corners will be cut.
In such an environment, it is easy to imagine that information security may be forgotten. Increased home working also expands the attack surface for cyber criminals, who will leverage the disruption caused by targeting companies at vulnerable points, such as payments. Given the volume of media attention, threat actors are already running virus-related phishing campaigns. The World Health Organization has issued a warning that criminals are posing as officials to plant malware to disrupt business operations or elicit funds.