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The spread of coronavirus is proving to be the modern world’s disastrous outbreak as its impact can significantly be seen across the global economies. The outbreak has already disrupted businesses across every industry, health, political and social patterns and systems. This has led the entire world to live under lockdown. However, now as governments and authorities worldwide are fighting against the pandemic, the volume of email threats related to the COVID-19 is spreading increasingly, creating major cybersecurity threats.

Malicious actors, hackers, or cybercriminals can take advantage of the vulnerabilities in the security protections of medical facilities, homes and factories. Simultaneously, many governments have rethought physical security with surveillance infrastructure to enforce coronavirus quarantines. Many industry leaders also consider the pandemic could catalyze technological and regulatory change.

While the COVID-19 quickly spreads around the globe, it has presented CISOs within organizations to come up with new approaches or strategies in order to ease threats of cyberattacks. Most businesses, in the time of global crisis, have allowed their employees to work from home since they have told to avoid traveling, public gathering and stay home as much as possible. In this regard, they must maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of consumer-facing network traffic as volumes spike.

Several businesses globally are now either planning for or actively deploying a business model involving far more remote workers than they had ever anticipated. Thus, to keep businesses working, decision-makers must consider effective cybersecurity practices, by asking questions like the technology and infrastructure they implemented outside and inside their organizations is secured against cyberattacks. And do all company employees, partners, stakeholders and relevant third parties have clear instructions and guidance regarding their work implementation in a secure manner?

So, while adhering to this kind of cyber hygiene practices, cyber risks are going to be multiple levels with more risk-causing vendors evolving with more sophisticated social engineering tactics and technical expertise. This is the time of analysis for businesses and countries' attentiveness to tackle cyber attacks and fortify resilience.

Keep Businesses Working with Effective Cybersecurity Management

While working remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic, employees need to leverage secured devices and maintain cyber hygiene by regularly updating their laptops, tablets, smartphones, PCs or other devices they use to work from home. Several companies are now issuing additional equipment to their workers, enabling them to remain effective as work remotely.

As organizations increasingly offer or enforce work from home policies, the reliance on digital infrastructure also heightens and may raise the cost of failure. In this case, it is significant to secure the networks that workers use while working remotely or from home. Using well-configured VPNs enables secure access to the network through a private tunnel. But in the case of providing access from the open internet to employees, there is a need to consider that are they connecting to a particular external firewall, or a well-managed cloud service? So, when planning user access, just limit the exposure of additional areas of the network to the internet that might cause attack vulnerabilities.