The new era of remote work launched by COVID has given millions of employees the ability to work on their own terms and spend more time with their families. Unfortunately, remote work also comes with certain security risks, as organizations now need to guard against increased exposure to cybersecurity concerns with little physical oversight. But embracing remote work does not need to mean handing employees’ laptops with sensitive company information and hoping all goes well.

This is the important question that Veriato Head of Product & Technology, Jay Godse asks in his new article, published this week. With so many employees working from home, it’s hard for CISOs, managers and HR leaders to know what they are doing, and that creates risk. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Threats to the company are much harder to spot when people are working at home.

Every employee is hired to do a job, but every employee also represents potential risk to their company. In the past year, 68% of employers have noted an increase in insider attacks. The top attacks include fraud, monetary gain and IP theft and cost companies millions of dollars. One major reason for an increase in insider risk in the past year is remote work. Not only are people outside of their manager’s physical view, they are often working outside of their company’s network.

The rising adoption of digital processes in manufacturing has fundamentally changed how this sector does business. The increased reliance on digitization and network connectivity has sharpened the risks of company data exfiltration, intellectual property damages, and more, especially those stemming from insiders. Insider threat actors operate from a position of trust that allows them to circumvent security and evade detection for months, if not years.

Though the level of fear of Covid 19 has diminished, there are other fears surrounding the 2022 Olympic games. Fears of telecom disruptions and ransomware attacks are founded, and the damage that could be caused has increased with the reliance on technology to broadcast the Games, which kicks off on February 4. Organizers are preparing for the kind of cyberattack that temporarily paralyzed IT systems ahead of the official opening ceremonies of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Remote learning is now an inevitable reality for academic institutions. Even before the pandemic, remote learning was on the rise. The pandemic has only made that trend more pervasive and dominant across institutions, most notably among the public schools. The Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a federally funded threat intelligence and cybersecurity advisory organization, recorded a 19% increase in cyberattacks targeting K-12 schools in the 2019-2020 school year.

Social engineering is an insidious way of getting "insider access" into an organization's network and data. Threat actors use it to gain sweeping access to carry out sophisticated attacks while evading detection. This "insider" leeway of social engineering makes it an alarming threat that cybercriminals are routinely exploiting now more than ever.

October is a month that generates much buzz amongst the cybersecurity community. It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) – a time when security professionals work around the clock to raise awareness of growing cyber risks amongst general user communities.

While there’s no real way to prevent them all, understanding vulnerabilities, common types of cyberattacks and how to prevent them can help college and university leaders prioritize their security strategies to help keep institutional data and students safe.

Ransomware has become an annual event for many organizations, costing them millions in lost productivity and revenue. While there have been some notable successes in fighting off this threat, the industry as a whole must continue strengthening its resolve in order to safeguard against future attacks. Part of this can come down to recognizing the role that users and employees play in fighting off these attacks and providing them with info and tools they need to help reduce risks.