As the business world adjusts to the chaotic landscape of today’s economy, securing access from remote devices and endpoints has never been more critical. Equally critical is the requirement for organizations and their employees to practice good security hygiene. With the rising number of endpoints (laptops, servers, tablets, smartphones) requiring access to corporate networks, the range of attackable targets for malicious actors has broadened substantially.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a huge list of challenges for businesses. One that is potentially going unnoticed or under-reported is cybersecurity. Specifically, as lockdown ends and as individuals return to offices and places of work, it may be the case that something malicious is already waiting for them on their devices. Here we take a look at the cyber risks of remote workers returning to the office.

Working remotely has its own personal challenges in terms of productivity: between the cat walking across your keyboard and the kids dropping in on your Zoom meetings, workers across the globe have had to adjust to doing their job in a different way. Organisations also had to swiftly transition to employees working remotely, and this has introduced a new set of risks from a cyber security perspective.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, many organisations have had to make a swift transition to remote working to ensure business continuity. What would typically take months of planning and preparation was implemented in a matter of days. The chaos that this created, combined with the already uncertain nature of life during a pandemic, had created the ideal environment for cybercriminals.