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.

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.

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.

Between personal accounts and work accounts, the sheer number of credentials and passwords that we have to manage can be overwhelming and inconvenient – especially if we forget them. While managing passwords may be a pain, it’s necessary if we want to protect our personal information. After all, cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility. 

The role of policy is to codify guiding principles, shape and require behavior, provide guidance to those who are tasked with making present and future decisions, and serve as an implementation roadmap. An information security policy (ISP) is a directive that:

With the number of cyberattacks occurring today, it’s especially important for companies to be knowledgeable when it comes to cybersecurity best practices, how to create and nurture cybersecurity culture, and how to hunt for threats on the network. But no organization – large or small, public or private – is immune to a data breach, even with appropriate security measures in place.