Sage Advice - Cybersecurity Blog

We’re a year in to the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. There are still millions of people working from home, and studies suggest that the model of working remotely – whether full-time, part time, temporary, or permanent – probably won’t go away completely anytime soon. A Gartner survey revealed that 82% of organizations will continue to allow increased work from home (WFH) days post-pandemic, and some 47% are considering allowing employees to WFH full-time post-pandemic. That’s a huge percentage of the workforce. Having a safe and secure at-home network is becoming increasingly important (and necessary) to keep cybercriminals away from your personal and professional data.

Following are five tips, gathered from SANS, that you can easily implement to ensure a more secure home office network.

As we’ve learned before, there are many ways hackers can get to your valuable data. From under-the-radar location tracking, to sophisticated in-person and online social engineering and phishing attempts, to full-blown ransomware attacks, and more. Cybercriminals are always on the move to carry out bigger, better, and more impactful attacks to get what they want.

This year brought about unprecedented changes that no one was prepared for. It served as an important reminder that in the rapidly changing environment, organizations need to be prepared to respond to threats and recover from disruptions so they can continue to thrive.

As cybersecurity professionals, we know how dynamic the threat environment can be, but this year brought about unprecedented changes to how we live and work that none of us saw coming. The shift to working remotely and accelerating cloud adoption continues to expand the enterprise attack surface. Our cyberthreat landscape has never been more challenging.

In today’s world, it can be time consuming to keep up with the current cyberthreat landscape, especially when many organizations do not have dedicated security staff. However, the landscape changes daily, and it’s important to be aware of what’s happening in the digital world that surrounds you.

Passwords are essential to keep both your professional and personal information protected. With nearly all business being conducted online and many of us working remotely, we all have multiple accounts to manage. Strong, unique passwords are a great defense against hackers.

The cyberthreat environment changes every day. New malware is developed, new social engineering tactics are deployed, and fraud is seemingly lurking around every corner. Because of the cybersecurity risk that these threats pose, we are all responsible for doing our part to keep information secure at home and at work.

Cybersecurity, as we know it today, is defined as the “the art of protecting networks, devices, and data from unauthorized access or criminal use and the practice of ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information,” according to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. In the 1990s, organizations across the globe started to practice information security to keep data safe. A few years later – as cybercriminals continued to get more sophisticated and organizations had to face the devastating consequences – the idea of cybersecurity over information security evolved.

Before cybersecurity became a standard part of our lexicon, the practice of keeping information and data safe was simply known as information security. Although the two terms are still used interchangeably, there is a definite distinction between the two, which provides context and explains the evolution this discipline has recognized over the past two decades. This paradigm provides perspective and instruction for when your organization starts to build and implement a cybersecurity program today.

Achieving cybersecurity maturity is something that organizations should strive to reach over time. Once an organization has a mature cybersecurity program, they will be equipped with the knowledge and power to adapt to the ever-changing threat landscape – a key to becoming a resilient organization. It sounds simple, but gaining cybersecurity maturity is a fluid, never-ending work in progress that should always be improved upon. Let’s dive in.