Protect your Remote Employees from Cyber Threats | #hrmanagement #hrexecutive

Before the novel coronavirus took over the world, remote working seemed like a dream. However, desperate times call for desperate measures, and that’s exactly what remote working was all about. Covid-19 gave birth to this new type of work environment. 

And while it wasn’t once even taken into consideration, it’s now standard practice for employees all across the world.

However, while the flexibility of remote working increased productivity among all employees, it also increased the chances of cyberattacks. In fact, an increase of 300% in cybercrimes was noticed since the start of the pandemic. 

Due to this, a variety of cybersecurity tools were needed to encrypt connections and protect company data. Many companies that once didn’t consider cybercrime a significant issue for their business started opting for effective cybersecurity measures as well.

One such tool that has become extremely popular in the post-Covid era is VPN. Both paid and free VPNs saw a huge surge in numbers. 

While paid VPNs offer more features, free VPNs are good enough to handle day-to-day challenges. For the most reliable and secure free VPN services, we recommend you check out the best free VPNs by VPNRanks.

So, if you’ve adopted this remote working technique for productive results, then here are a few measures you need to take to protect your employees from cyber threats:

Preventive Measures to Protect Your Remote Employees from Cyber Threats

Your employees working from home may be assets to you, but they can get you in trouble as well as home networks are easier to breach. Let’s look into the five significant tips to protect your remote employees from data breaches:

1. Suggest them to use a VPN Service:

The first tip we have for you is to suggest your employees use a reliable Virtual Private Network. VPN services are known to be shady, but truth be told, they’re the perfect choice for encrypting your entire connection and protecting your employees from becoming victims of a cyberattack. 

VPNs offer a variety of security features to users. First, they come with military-grade AES 256-bit encryption for complete network encryption. With this feature, their entire connection would be completely encrypted, and no cybercriminal would be able to snoop in. 

Other features of VPNs include split tunneling so that they can use the VPN-enabled connection and their normal network at the same time. VPNs also offer DNS leak protection, no-logs, kill switch, and much more. 

2. Inform remote employees about phishing scams:

The second thing you need to do as an employer is, disseminate knowledge about phishing emails and scams to your remote employees. According to research, one in every four remote employees clicked on a phishing link during Covid-19. That’s not it. The average cost of a data breach spiked to $137,000 due to remote working. 

This is why you need to inform your remote employees how common phishing emails and attacks are and why they should avoid them at all costs. While phishing emails may look like official emails from the office, they might not be authentic.

3. Advice them not to use work-owned devices for personal use:

Employees shouldn’t use their work devices to go through your emails, enjoy movies, or surf the internet. 

Why? 

Because a vast majority of data breaches occur through email links, accessing inauthentic websites, and intrusive ads.

Hackers lurking around the internet can easily insert any malware on their devices if they visit a phishing site or click on any links and breach all their data. 

Therefore, they should only keep their work equipment to access the company’s network and to visit work-related websites only.

4. Ask them to configure multi-factor authentication (MFA):

For making it difficult for a cybercriminal to get into your employee’s devices or hack their work accounts, they can set up multi-factor authentication on their devices, network, and accounts. 

For example, they would be required to enter your password and a code that’ll be delivered exclusively on their number. Or, a password and fingerprint combo might work as well. 

Multi-factor authentication makes verification of identity super-easy, and accounts secured with MFA are difficult to break into. 

Therefore, to prevent cybercriminals and unauthorized users from accessing your remote employees’ network, device, or account, they’re required to configure MFA everywhere.

5. Provide cybersecurity training to employees:

Employees, especially the ones working from home, expose their companies to cyberattacks. 

So, to prevent them from putting all your valuable data at risk, you need to provide them with effective cybersecurity training. 

A set of training that includes employees to learn to detect phishing emails, avoid fraudulent phone calls requesting personal business details, and effective cybersecurity practices that they can opt for can be quite advantageous for your employees working from home. 

The tips above aren’t the only ones that can prevent your business from cyberattacks. Remote employees keeping their software updated, setting up firewalls, and using strong passwords would also do wonders in this regard.