If you have cybersecurity insurance or feel this incident could cause significant damage, consider having a forensic analysis to track down what happened.

Contact your email provider, explain what happened, and ask for help. Continue down this list while you wait for their response.

Reset your email account password immediately. If you can’t log in because someone unauthorized reset your password, try resetting it yourself. If that doesn’t work, contact your email company’s tech support.

Check if your username and old passwords have appeared on the dark web. Visit https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and similar sites to find out. Never enter your password.

Change passwords for all your accounts including social media, banking, and other sensitive accounts, especially if you’ve used the same password for multiple accounts. Someone may have access to more than just your email.

Consider using a password manager like 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass, NordPass or another to help ease the pain of having different passwords on every website from now on.

When setting up security questions, avoid real answers that are easy for a bad actor to research. When asked, “Where were you born,” you could answer something like, “The fourth crater on the moon.” Save your secret answers in a file in a random place with a random name like “socks.docx” for when you need the answers. You can encrypt the file for added safety.

Enable two-step verification for your email account. While you are at it, set up two-step verification everywhere you can, primarily on sensitive websites and services. Here is how to add MFA to your LinkedIn account for added security https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/544/turning-two-step-verification-on-and-off?lang=en

If you set up two step authentication so that the site or service sends you an email message for the second part of logging in, and the hacker has access your email, it defeats the purpose of MFA. Therefore, if you set up the two-step login with email as the second step, use a different secure email address.

Review your email’s “sent” folder to spot any unrecognized messages.

Look at all your email accounts in your organization to ensure there are no email forwarding or filtering rules you did not configure.

Check your websites, especially LinkedIn, for any unauthorized changes.

Set up SPF and DKIM. More information here: https://fosterinstitute.com/block-inbound-and-outbound-fraudulent-email-messages/

Watch out for remote control applications that might allow a bad actor to compromise your computer and send email messages as you.

Be aware that your computer or another computer in your organization might be hacked, enabling attackers to send messages on your behalf. Stay vigilant and take measures to protect against such incidents.

Regularly apply critical security patches to your computer. You can check for updates manually, even if automatic updates are enabled.

Ensure your anti-virus program is current and run a manual scan regularly. Using EDR or XDR services add more security.

If you use a browser to send and receive email, this is a drastic step, but consider uninstalling the browser. When you reinstall the browser, add only the plugins you need.

If you use your phone or tablet for email, they could be hacked. Apply security patches, keep them in your possession, examine the privacy settings, and lock devices when not in use.

Watch out for apps on your computer, tablet, or phone that may be harvesting your address book without your knowledge. A drastic move would be to factory reset and erase them, but be sure your important data is stored in the cloud or backed up.

Notify financial institutions that if they receive messages from you, the messages could be fraudulent.

You might want to set up a new email address to use until you feel confident your old address is safe.

If you haven’t already, freeze your credit.

Monitor your financial accounts.

Before you send out notifications, you will want to talk to an advisor who can help you know what to say.

Please forward this to your friends so that, if someone appears to hack their email account, they will know what to do to.

Subscribe to maximize your executive potential with Foster Institute’s E-Savvy Newsletter, packed with practical IT security solutions and actionable strategies for success: https://fosterinstitute.com/e-savvy-newsletter/

The post What to Do if Someone Hacks Your Email Account appeared first on Foster Institute.

–> ONE: Ask your IT team, “Do we still have Microsoft Exchange Server email software installed anywhere?”

If they answer affirmatively, even if they’re already moving to the cloud, you must continue:

–> TWO: Ask them, “What can I take off your plate or postpone so that you can immediately test and deploy the patches to the Exchange Server right now?”

Essential: Applying security updates to your Exchange server does not resolve the issue if your organization is already compromised. There might be a small program on your system quietly waiting for an attacker’s commands.

To help determine if you are already compromised: https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/03/02/hafnium-targeting-exchange-servers/#scan-log

If your team cannot update immediately, send them here: https://github.com/microsoft/CSS-Exchange/tree/main/Security

–> THREE: Say, “The emergency is too great to postpone. Later, let’s discuss the pros and cons of moving email to the cloud.”

Pros include eliminating one server and associated headaches. Often, online email is better for remote workers too. But you could lose some integration features you have now, for example, an on-site phone system tied into Exchange. Because saving money and streamlining is essential, online Exchange is often less expensive.

The blog posting https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/03/02/hafnium-targeting-exchange-servers/#scan-log has a plethora of other information and guidance for your team related to the updates. Some organizations are experiencing errors after applying the security updates. For example, some learned they must install the updates from an elevated command prompt window. Microsoft provides more guidance:

https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2021/03/05/microsoft-exchange-server-vulnerabilities-mitigations-march-2021/

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/description-of-the-security-update-for-microsoft-exchange-server-2019-2016-and-2013-march-2-2021-kb5000871-9800a6bb-0a21-4ee7-b9da-fa85b3e1d23b

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/description-of-the-security-update-for-microsoft-exchange-server-2010-service-pack-3-march-2-2021-kb5000978-894f27bf-281e-44f8-b9ba-dad705534459

The post Three Essential Questions to Ask Your IT Team Today Because of the Massive Exchange Attack appeared first on Foster Institute.

A little background information helps explain what is going on: Every device connected to a network has a serial number, called a MAC address. That address is how the network identifies the device and differentiates it from all the other devices on a network. As you can imagine, networks need to know what devices are connected. Think of what might happen if the network thought your computer was a printer. Printer paper might not come shooting out of your keyboard, knock over your coffee or smoothie, but you get the idea.

Because the MAC address uniquely identifies you for everyone else, think of the MAC address as a fingerprint for your device. Potentially, an advertiser, or someone in a public place, could use your fingerprint, in this case, your device’s MAC address, to track you, your activities, and what networks you use.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft want to help protect your privacy, so they might periodically change the MAC address on your computer to a different address. The new behavior strives to help keep you more anonymous on public networks at hotels and coffee shops. However, randomly changing MAC addresses can break essential security features, including:

1) As my friend did, you might start receiving alarming alerts that another person connected a new device to one of your websites or accounts. The warnings are concerning until you realize it is your computer reconnecting with a new unique index. After a time, you might ignore the alerts. But then you won’t know if a real attacker broke into your account with some other computer, tablet, or phone.

2) Parental controls at home fail if the safety restrictions are unique for each family device. When a youngster disconnects and reconnects to your network, sometimes they are no longer protected.

3) Your company keeps an inventory of your computers, tablets, and phones. It is challenging to keep the list current when your IT team must track three times as many devices as you have.

How do you solve this? It is possible to disable the randomization feature, but it takes time to reconfigure. Time is a precious commodity for you and your IT team too. An example of how to disable the behavior on iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches: support.apple.com/en-us/HT211227

However, your employees or kids could change the feature back again to help them hide on your networks.

The answer to my friend’s question is that if the website tells you a date, time, and location of that person’s login, and you know you weren’t logging in from there at that time, yes, you need to be concerned. Otherwise, your experience may be because your device is disguising itself from the website. Disable the randomization feature, and the problem might go away.

Please forward this to your friends so that if they, or their IT team, cannot figure out why some of your security features are breaking, they will know to suspect their devices are rotating through MAC addresses.

If you want more technical details, a network identifies your device with an index number called a MAC address when you connect. There are more than 280 trillion possibilities for a MAC address; the odds are that nobody you know has the same number as your device. The first half of the number identifies the manufacturer; that makes it easier to find unidentified devices on a network.

Other problems you’ll notice because of rotating MAC addresses include:

4) Security tools at the office fail to work if the security tools rely on associating users with their computers, tablets, or phones. This problem affects both BYOD and company-issued devices.

5) IT Professionals can configure necessary reservations for computers, tablets, and phones. Those reservations are based on index numbers. When the index changes, the reservation stops working, and systems can fail or lose security.

6) Your websites will forget you. Some sites have a feature to Remember This Computer, so you do not need to go through as many steps each time you log in. The sites identify your devices by their index numbers. Your device will need to be re-remembered when your index changes.

MAC addresses look like FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF where each value I listed as F can be a hexadecimal digit 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, A, B, C, D, E, or F. If you know where to look, your phone, tablet, and computer can tell you the MAC addresses of each network interface.

The new behavior is causing lots of frustration in the cybersecurity world. This battle isn’t over yet.

The post Your Phone, Tablet, and Computer Started Hiding You – and How to Overcome the Associated Problems appeared first on Foster Institute.

The attacker does not need to know any passwords; they do not even need a username. They plug in a cable, and 3 seconds later, they’ve completely compromised your network. An attacker posing as a visitor, a copier repair person, or a member of a cleaning crew can all compromise your organization. They can steal sensitive information, install ransomware, and can shut down operations entirely. They bypass the majority of, if not all, of your other protections because now they’re a Domain Administrator.

This exploit is so severe that the Department of Homeland Security directed all federal agencies to apply the patch in accordance with the Federal Emergency Directive 20-04.

Take these three steps ASAP:

First, ask your IT team if they’ve backed up your Domain Controller servers and applied Microsoft’s patches that address the Zerologon exploit CVE-2020-1472. They must do this immediately. Be compassionate if they’ve not. IMPORTANT: Realize that if an attacker already took over a network, the patch doesn’t help.

Second, if you have Domain Controllers using operating systems older than Windows Server 2008 R2, your IT professionals must shut them down for good. Be sure to migrate any mission-critical services to other servers.

Third, does your organization rely on third parties to support you? What if one of your major suppliers, a distributor, or your biggest customer falls prey to an attack? Prepare your organization now for an interruption of their operations. Be sure their executives know about this flaw and these three steps. You do not want a catastrophe at their organization to domino and cause a disaster for you, even though you’ve protected your systems.

Additional steps:

Inform your work-from-home team members that, in some cases, the attacker can take over your network using a VPN connection. Do you have an armed guard at every work-from-home user’s home to watch visitors? Of course not. But your entire organization might rely on their security. What if a teenager’s friend feels like playing around, experimenting, with this new cool exploit on a mom or dad’s computer?

The patches only protect you from attacks from Windows devices. If an attacker accesses a network port or cable with a non-Windows machine, the attacker can still take control of your network. Microsoft will release a second patch on February 9, 2021. Ask your IT team to configure alerts now to monitor security log events 5827 thru 5831 to see when connections are allowed or denied.

The average time for IT Professionals to apply critical security patches is five months, but you need to help yours be above average. Ask them what you can do to help them have time to test and install all critical security patches within 14 days or sooner. They might want to have a patch management tool. They might need more time to devote to applying updates.

Confirm that your IT Team disconnects or disables all unused Ethernet ports, including those in conference rooms. Lock doors to any offices and conference rooms that contain active Ethernet ports. Train everyone to be proactive and remove opportunities for anyone, including guests and repair people, to plug a device into a network port.

Keep in mind that 911 systems, airlines, governments, and every organization that you depend on are at risk for Zerologon exploit CVE-2020-1472 until they take action too.

Please forward this to fellow executives you care about so they can support their IT Professionals successfully backing up servers and applying the emergency patch.

The post Attackers Can Take Control of Your Network in Three Seconds, and How to Stop Them appeared first on Foster Institute.

This video walks you through setting up the two step login feature of Zoom.

To help protect your Zoom meetings, watch other videos that cover concerns about using Zoom:

Zoom Security Settings – The Concise Details

Zoom Security Issues – Protect Yourself

Zoom Security – Follow Along to Set Settings

The post Zoom Security – Set Up Two-Step Login appeared first on Foster Institute.

The post Zoom Security Settings – The Concise Details appeared first on Foster Institute.

This video is for non-technical people who need to make Zoom more secure today. So, if that’s you, open up your zoom account settings on your screen, and keep this video where you can see it side-by-side. Pause the video when you need to.

Some people say, “Mike, tell us what settings to change to increase our Zoom security.” If that’s you, then you are going to love this video. It walks you through your Zoom account settings so you can follow along.

I know that some of you will want to fine tune the settings more than this. This video is not designed to replace your IT Pro; they know more about your specific system and requirements.

To help protect your Zoom meetings, watch other videos that cover concerns about using Zoom:

Zoom Security – Set Up Two-Step Login

Zoom Security Settings – The Concise Details

Zoom Security Issues – Protect Yourself

The post Zoom Security – Follow Along to Set Security Settings appeared first on Foster Institute.

To help prevent an attacker logging into your Zoom account, enable two-step login. Once activated, then when you log in, you’ll enter your password along with a separate numerical code. Rather than sending the code as a text message, Zoom uses a more secure approach and requires you to use a passcode generator app. To configure two-step login, go into your account settings. Scroll down until you see the word Admin in the left-hand column, click on Advanced and then click the security option. Scroll down the main window until you see Sign in with Two-Factor Authentication. Enable the option. Sign out of Zoom and sign back in to complete the installation. Follow the prompts to associate your authentication app with Zoom.

When you schedule a meeting, for Meeting ID setting, select Generate Automatically. I’ll explain why soon, know that you need to keep your Personal Meeting ID private except for a few people you trust.

Zoom permits you to choose whether or not to require passwords for your meetings. In most cases, you should require a password. As long as someone gets the meeting notice you send them, they won’t even need the password because the password gets imbedded into the meeting invitation. However, embedding the passphrase inside the invitation exposes you to a risk. If an unauthorized person obtains the invitation, they too can authenticate to your meeting without needing to know the password.

One of the best security features is a tool called Waiting Room. Tomorrow’s tool will show how to set it up quickly. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to receive the links for a powerful experience tomorrow and a concise video on Monday morning.

The post Make your Zoom Secure appeared first on Foster Institute.

You may have heard that Netflix agreed to reduce the picture quality of movies in the UK to reduce the load on the Internet. What’s that have to do with your company? Prepare a contingency plan now. Something easy to change is to instruct your workers to ask their family members to please download their movies at night rather than streaming the videos during work hours. That way, their family can watch their downloaded movies during the daytime without using up your workers’ remote network speed.

If your remote workers use VPN connections, and they experience slow speeds, your IT team can enable something called split tunneling. Then, if they aren’t already, your workers’ computers take a shortcut directly to the Internet without going a long way around through your primary office location’s firewall first. That trades speed for security, so executives have to make the decision, but the change might be worth it if your workers cannot work otherwise. There are other strategies too. Know that recorded video and audio conference calls will make it through even when a real-time conference is so slow it fails.

Other customers explain that the cellular towers in their area are so overloaded that phone calls get dropped, and voices are sometimes garbled beyond understandability. That’s when text messages, though less convenient, will be your plan B. At least text messages will usually go through even with weak or slow connections.

Please forward this message to your friends so they can have a plan in place at their company in case an Internet or cell phone traffic jam interferes with their business.

The post Plan Now for Slow Internet and Dropped Phone Calls appeared first on Foster Institute.

If the employee’s computer isn’t secure, your organization’s security is at risk. Attackers can compromise a home user’s device to gain a pathway into your organization’s network and data. Whether the attacker installs ransomware, steals sensitive information, or shuts down your entire network, you can suffer greatly. Therefore, you need to take essential steps to protect yourself, your employees, and your organization. Here are some key suggestions to help you navigate this crisis.

Remote Access Tools:
Your employees need to securely access email messages, applications, and data. You may need them to participate in secure meetings. They may need a phone that behaves as a secure extension as if they were at the office.

If you already have remote workers, your main concern will be to ensure your servers are powerful enough, your connections to the Internet fast enough, and that you have enough licenses to support the increased volume of activity.

There are so many choices of platforms and tools. Each has its own cybersecurity concerns. You might hear about remote access solutions such as Citrix, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, Remote Desktop, Splashtop, Terminal Server, and VNC. For meetings you may use BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, Join.me, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and Zoom.* There are others too. Let your IT team use the one they are most familiar with so they can deploy and troubleshoot solutions much quicker. You might ask them to share the pros, cons, and expenses of different solutions, but act as quickly as your risk appetite allows. It is difficult to predict how quickly the reaction to the coronavirus will accelerate.

A VPN Is Not Enough:
There is a worldwide misconception that VPNs provide security. By themselves, they do not. What VPNs do provide is privacy. Think of them as a tunnel that protects data from observation, deletion, and modification while the data travels inside the tunnel. But attacks can lurk at both ends of the tunnel. Therefore, both sides of the VPN connection must be secure. VPNs are useful to protect privacy, and there are other ways to help ensure privacy too.

Connections to the Internet:
Your remote workers need secure connections to the Internet. When they are working from home, they may share their network with less secure family members or compromised IoT devices. That’s why connecting at home might be too risky. Connecting to a coffee shop, hotel, or another public place is reckless unless you mandate compensating controls.

Sometimes the best way to resolve many security risks associated with the remote computer’s connectivity to the Internet is to provide them with a mobile hot spot. All the major phone carriers provide hotspots and most smartphones have the capability of behaving as a hotspot, enabling employees to connect via mobile phone data plans. Beware that even unlimited data plans are limited; once the user goes over a certain amount of data, the phone provider can throttle the speed of the data to an unacceptably slow connection. If you need unlimited data without throttling, consider a solution such as calyxinstitute.org.* Bear in mind that as more people work from home during the outbreak, mobile data speeds may deteriorate due to congestion. Evening and late nights will usually be faster, not only due to a drop in demand, but also mobile phone providers often allocate more bandwidth to data at night and reallocate bandwidth back to voice calls during the daytime.

Home Wireless Networks:
These days, it’s common that your users already have long wireless passwords and use at least WPA2 encryption on their Wi-Fi network. Disable a feature called WPS. WPS is designed to make it easy for people to connect new devices. Unfortunately, it also makes it easier for attackers to connect. If the user needs WPS to connect a new device, they can enable WPS temporarily. There is an option called MAC filtering that permits your user to specify what devices are allowed to connect to the access point so that, in theory, no unauthorized devices can connect. Beginner hackers know how to bypass MAC filtering, but you could use it to stop less savvy neighbors if you want.

Firewalls:
If your team connects from home networks, the protection from the modem their Internet Service Provider gave them has limited security. Bear in mind that the ISP’s primary goal is to eliminate compatibility issues with anything home users connect, so they avoid tight security controls that could upset a customer or cause more support calls. If possible, it is a great idea to tell the firewall to block specific content. For example, you could tell it to block known malicious sites, sites known for phishing, and websites with content about drugs. You can block traffic from all countries except the ones you need. If you use cloud applications, you may be surprised which countries that software takes you to.

For a secure connection, your IT department might equip your remote employees with smaller SOHO firewalls for their homes that run behind the users’ own firewalls. This can effectively isolate your users from the rest of their home network. If your employee must use a public network such as a coffee shop, your IT team can set up a hardware bridge to help protect their connection. Avoid the temptation to ask your IT team to examine and update consumer firewalls at users’ homes, as that can be enormously time-consuming depending on how many users you have.

Passwords and Cloud Security:
It is essential that you implement two-step verification for all your users. In the most basic form, a person enters their username and password, and then their phone receives a text message with a code they enter to finish the login process. The idea is that even if a bad actor learns someone’s username and password, they will not have access to the person’s mobile phone. To save time and reduce frustration, some websites feature a checkbox to remember that device in the future.

It is essential that your user locks their phone and prevents an unauthorized coworker, family member, or any other person from gaining access to their phone. Use text messages if that is the only option, and know that, while difficult, attackers who know the password might gain access to the text message too. Other options for the second step include phone callbacks, physical USB hardware token keys, authentication apps on phones, and one-tap login solutions. Common choices include YubiKey, Authy, Duo, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and RSA SecurID.* There are many others.

Password managers are helpful; there are many pros and few cons. Ask your IT team their preference, and you may choose to allow your remote workers to use, or not use, password managers the way they do now.

Computer Security Updates and Firewall Patches:
One of the best ways to increase security is to stay current with the most recent security updates for computer operating systems and programs. Security patches for firewalls are often overlooked with potentially devastating results. While at the office, your IT team can usually manage and deploy updates and patches. Your team might need extra tools to manage the updates on remote devices.

If your IT team won’t have time to manage the remote equipment, it is common to configure remote computers and firewalls to automatically install critical security updates. A big pro is that you can be more secure from known security threats. One con is a slight chance that patches that install automatically might cause a user’s device to malfunction. Security patches are so essential that you are probably better off applying them. Whether or not to apply updates automatically is a choice for executives to make depending on their risk appetite. Using golden images (see below) can reduce the potential negative impact of a misbehaved update.

Golden Image:
What if it is the middle of the night, or what if your IT team is unavailable, and the user’s computer is malfunctioning? Ask your IT team to provide employees with an external USB hard drive containing a clean backup image of how their computer should be configured. If the worker’s computer malfunctions, show the users how they can reinstall the golden image the IT team created when the computer was new. When a user restores this “golden image,” it is, from a software and operating system perspective, as if the user just received a brand-new computer. Beware that users must backup any local data files prior to restoring an image because the reset is so thorough that existing data will be removed. Another benefit is that if the user suspects there may be a virus on their computer, they can restore the golden image to reset the computer to a clean, fresh start.

Data File Backup to Local Removable Media:
Please do everything possible so that users do not need to store any local data on their computers. If they don’t need to carry files to and from the office, and if they don’t need data stored on their computer because it is on the network or in the cloud, that’s the best scenario. But you may want them to be able to work from home even if their Internet connection fails, or there may be another reason you need them to have files stored locally on their computer. If that’s the case, then the user should be able to back up their data files to local removable media. Examples include a USB memory stick or USB external hard drive. Your users need to save copies of their data files that are stored on their computer, if any, frequently. The duplicate copies of the files protect the user’s local data. If they need to apply a golden image, or if ransomware encrypts their local files, they need to have their important documents backed up.

It is essential that your IT team configure the backup drives so they are encrypted. It is too great a risk that one of the memory devices falls into the wrong hands and the data is compromised. Windows users can encrypt the devices with BitLocker. Note that if the user’s home version of Windows isn’t big enough to permit them to use BitLocker to encrypt their drives, IT can still encrypt the drives at work. Any version of Windows can access drives once they are encrypted with BitLocker. Mac users can use File Vault to encrypt an entire drive, but encrypting individual files is more secure on a Mac. There is another option for drive security that can be easier for your Windows and Mac users. Multiple vendors offer USB hard drives and memory sticks that have number keypads built into the device. Your users can literally type in a code to the device to lock and unlock the data.

Local Account is Standard User:
This is a crucial setting to stop hackers. Your IT team has hopefully had time to fix this setting on the company-issued computers. But if the user will use their home computer, someone needs to make this change on their personal device. Your IT team can fix this for them, making changes in the “control panel” under “users.” If you want to try this at home, the steps are: 1) Create a new user as a local account. Name it something like “Superhero.” 2) Change that user’s account type to be a local administrator. 3) Change your account type to standard. Now use your standard account from now on. Login to the account you always do. In case you have Mac users, the process is similar.

Reduce the Attack Surface:
Every program on a computer is a potential attack vector. The more programs you remove, the more secure a computer becomes. If the user is on their home computer, they probably have many non-essential programs. Attackers can exploit Flash and Java to execute malicious code, so it is best to remove both from all computers. Many people find that the websites that are essential work fine without Flash or Java. If they need Flash or Java again later, users can download fresh versions from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ or java.com.

Computer Anti-Virus and Software Firewall Settings:
If your employees have company-issued devices, chances are that your IT team configures and maintains their anti-malware solution. If employees will use their home computers, they must be sure their anti-virus is working properly and is up-to-date.

It is essential that they configure the software firewall program component of their anti-virus product, or the software firewall built into their computer’s operating system, to refuse all incoming connections. Some firewalls and Macs provide an option called “stealth mode.” When you activate this, you may get a scary warning that if you configure the computer to hide, it becomes difficult for outside parties to connect to the computer. Yes, that’s the point! Block everyone. Nobody needs in except your IT professionals, and they already have a way in.

Physical Security:
If an attacker gains physical access to a user’s laptop, computer, phone, tablet, or other devices, compromising the security is magnitudes easier. Calculate the impact if a user’s device is compromised, allowing attackers access into your network. The repercussions to your organization might be devastating. If necessary, provide your users with pick-proof locks for their doors. You can ask them to take photos of their home locks to send to you, and you might want to send a member of your facilities team, or a specialist, to examine their home’s security.

Sometimes companies issue outside security cameras and inexpensive alarm systems to their employees. While those sound like a good idea, they primarily detect, not prevent, break-ins. Deterrents are certainly good, including alarm stickers on doors and windows. But remember to implement preventative controls including high-quality deadbolt locks, reinforced door jambs, and sliding door security bars. Exterior motion-sensing flood lights can be very effective too. Having tight security can even enhance your employees’ and their family’s personal safety. Giving them added peace-of-mind during this crisis is helpful.

UPS Battery Backup:
If the coronavirus response becomes very serious, it is possible users might experience loss of power. If there is a loss, hopefully it will be short. Consider providing battery backup devices to users with desktop computers, printers, and home modems. If the user has a charged laptop and a charged battery-powered hotspot, and no printer, the battery backup is often unnecessary.

Special Security Training about Coronavirus:
Warn your workers that there will be an increase in spam and phishing as bad actors prey on their worries of the virus. They must be vigilant to spam and fake news. Recent hacks provided attackers with detailed information about families and histories, so that phishing can be more convincing than ever. Manually visiting, rather than clicking links to, ready.gov and CDC.gov contain information about how to prepare and find status updates.

Test Remote Access:
All of your users need to engage in a “pretend it is real” run through. Once they are configured, they need to test performing all of their job functions working from home to be sure everything performs as expected. Solve problems that come up. If one user has an issue, take preemptive action to be sure it doesn’t happen with the others. This is too important to not test out ahead of time. Your workers may wake up one morning and find out they have to stay at home that day. Every night they need to take what they’ll need to work from home just in case. If they are able to come to work the next day, they’ll need to haul all that stuff back and forth. Minimize as much as possible what they’ll need to take.

Additionally, give your employees guidelines on what to do if they lose connectivity to the office, and what to do if they feel like their remote computer might be under attack. Consider that, if your IT team is busy tackling bigger challenges, they may not be available to help that user right then.

Show Extra Gratitude to IT:
Finally, throw a big party for your IT team that made all of this happen. Chances are they’ve invested more energy and patience than you know because they make it look so easy. Tell them that you recognize the amount of expertise they needed to get you to the point of accomplishing this list. A little gratitude goes a long way.

All your preparations are worth it. The World Health Organization is already saying there will be more viruses in Earth’s future. You are preparing for the future too. Good job implementing these recommendations now. The increase in the number of people who must work from home because of coronavirus could accelerate quickly at any time.

Please forward this to your friends so they can prepare their organizations too.

*The Foster Institute, Inc. does not receive any compensation from, nor does it endorse, any products or companies mentioned in this article.

The post Recommendations for Cybersecurity for Remote Workers During Coronavirus appeared first on Foster Institute.