How to Avoid Cyberattacks for Work-From-Home Employees

For instance, recently in Britain, hackers have launched a wave of cyber-attacks to exploit the people who are working from home. The percentage of malicious email traffic before the UK’s lockdown began was 12% but after 6 weeks it is more than 60%. These cyberattacks are now more sophisticated and are especially focused on coronavirus related anxieties rather than the usual attempts at financial frauds and extortion.

At the beginning of May, Darktrace found “a large malicious email campaign” against UK businesses that told employees working from home that they could choose to be furloughed if sign-in on a particular website. There are also reports of attacks that have targeted tools that are used by employees who are working from home. For example, fake requests to reset VPN accounts (a virtual private network) and zoom video conferencing accounts with the faked sign-in pages.

There is also an increase in spoofing attacks with emails disguised as an email from a colleague. Darktrace said that one-fifth of malicious emails will normally use some form of spoofing but this rate has reached 60%. There was one spoofing attack in which there was an unnamed company chief executive asking workers to donate to his health charity, and there were also many cases of fake IT support departments asking workers to download new software.

Since employees working from home are not trained on data privacy protocols, they can risk exposing sensitive information to data breaches. But steps can be taken by the company and its employees to prepare for these malicious activities and decrease these cyberattacks.