Adapting and responding to the “New Normal”

Now that we are a couple weeks into this new normal working from home environment, we are seeing a great strain on everyone’s infrastructure and increased activity from cybercriminals. With no end in sight for the “new normal” environment, we all must ensure that this crisis situation does not present an opportunity for digital (or cyber) disaster. In this blog I will share what we are seeing across most clients and how you can mitigate chaos and risk.

Threats we are seeing:

· Increased phishing attacks

· Account Compromises

· Misinformation / Disinformation

· Denial of services

· Financial Scams

Challenges in the new environment:

· The # of endpoints under protection just increased dramatically

· Users are leveraging more cloud-based services and potentially exposing data

· Throughput on the video conferencing tools can create problems

· Distractions in the home

· Technical support issues

· Time management

How can you support your users and maintain your corporate security posture:

· Advise users to offset video calls from the top of the hour and half hour to reduce competition

· Monitor security intelligence sources and monitoring systems to identify and block sites and IP addresses at the network edge

· Establish new policies that address work from home standards and guidelines

· Monitor network bandwidth capacity to identify constraint and potential security threats

· Publish your own information on the crisis so that users have a source of truth

· Work with users to identify new tools which can help them be more efficient

· Ensure you stay current on patch management

What you should be doing (Personally):

· Ensure you have MFA on all accounts (even home services like Netflix)

· Make sure your home Wi-Fi uses strong encryption and passwords

· Don’t allow work computers to be used by children

· Be hypervigilant on phishing attacks

· Don’t use new sharing tools without verifying with IT and security

Pillar Technology Partners has deep experience across IT infrastructure as well as cyber security. We are working with clients every day to ensure their “new normal” is as efficient and secure as their old normal environment. Pillar has resources immediately available to help with:

· Security Guidance and policy review

· File sharing and protection

· Threat Intelligence and monitoring (Virtual MDR)

· Infrastructure expertise

· Virtual Incident Response

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To see the latests Cyber Coalition Intelligence Briefing, click here.