Study Shows Working From Home Could Be Here To Stay

It goes without saying that the pandemic has changed a great many things about life, as well as the world we live and work in. One significant change on the work front has, of course, been the dramatic rise in the number of people working from home.

We’re reaching a point now where, although we haven’t quite turned a corner where the pandemic is concerned, we’re clearly fast approaching that point.

Many planners and strategic thinkers are looking ahead and wondering what the future of work will be. Will everyone simply pack up their gear and head back into the office, or will we see a permanent shift to working from home for some portion of the workforce?

The short answer is that it’s probably going to wind up being a bit of both. Recently, Verizon conducted an in-depth study in an attempt to gauge the longer-term effects of the pandemic and based on the survey data they collected, fully 7 in 10 Americans prefer working remotely or in some hybrid remote/in-office capacity.

Additionally, 69 percent of survey respondents said that they expect to work remotely at least 1-2 days per week a year from now, and 54 percent said they expect that remote work will be a regular feature of work life going forward. Employers, eager to keep their star performers happy, will no doubt take heed and respond accordingly.

In addition to the points above, the survey revealed a few additional points of interest including:

  • 31 percent of respondents said they spend 3 hours a week or more on mobile devices.
  • 32 percent of respondents have either upgraded or considered upgrading their Internet bandwidth.
  • 42 percent of adults anticipate that a year from now they will be shopping in person and online equally.
  • 47 percent of adults have subscribed to a new streaming service.
  • 67 percent of adults are spending at least 3 hours per week watching live TV with 59 percent watch content through a streaming service.

Intriguing findings. If you haven’t made any specific post pandemic plans either way, these statistics certainly bear thinking about.

Employees Targeted By Hackers Posing As HR Department

Just when you think scammers couldn’t get any lower, they find new ways to prove you wrong.  Recently, a new phishing scam has been spotted in the wild, this one baiting potential victims with the possibility of pay raises.

The scammers structured their email so that they appeared to come from the Human Resources department of their victims’ companies.

They asked the recipient of their phishing email to open an Excel spreadsheet bearing the name “salary-increase-sheet-November-2019.xls.”  A shortcut to the remotely hosted spreadsheet was naturally provided.

The body of the email explained that “The Years Wage increase will start in November 2019 and will be paid out for the first time in December, with recalculation as of November.”  Needless to say, this tends to catch most people’s attention.  After all, who doesn’t want a raise, right?

If a recipient clicked on the link, he or she would then be asked to provide Office 365 login credentials in order to see the file.  Of course, the file contains dummy data and has nothing to do with getting a raise; it’s simply a useful hook to get an unwitting user to hand over their credentials.

The scammers not only constructed a convincing looking email, but the Office 365 login screen looks exactly like a legitimate login screen. This goes far in explaining the campaign’s unusually high success rate.

The researchers who have been following the issue urge Office 365 users to enable multi-factor authentication via Office 365 or a third-party solution. They also encourage business owners to enroll their staff in phishing awareness training programs designed to help employees spot and report phishing attempts more easily.

Be on high alert for this one.  So far it has proved to be a highly effective campaign.

American Express Employee Compromises Customer Information

American Express has been quietly contacting some of its customers with a tersely worded communication that reads, in part, as follows:

“It was brought to our attention that personal information related to your American Express Card account listed above, may have been wrongfully accessed by one of our employees in an attempt to conduct fraudulent activity, including potentially opening accounts at other financial institutions.  In response, we immediately launched an investigation and are fully cooperating with law enforcement agencies to further their investigation.”

There are a couple of noteworthy things about this.  First, it’s American Express, one of the Titans of the Financial industry.  While it’s true that AMEX has been compromised before and certainly will be in the future, it underscores the fact that it doesn’t matter who you are or how big your company, you are not safe.

Second, it highlights a problem that seldom gets mentioned when we talk about data breaches.  This one came from the inside.

Your employees are simultaneously your greatest asset and your company’s biggest point of weakness, as this incident reveals.  It doesn’t matter how much you spend on information security. An employee working from the inside can circumvent every security measure you have in place.

Worse, there are no good solutions to this issue.  Obviously, your employees need access to data in order to do the job you hired them to do, and often that data is of a sensitive nature.  Even if your hiring practices are quite robust and do a generally good job of weeding out potentially weak links in the chain, there’s simply no good way to guarantee that any employee you take a chance on hiring won’t ultimately be the one to betray your trust and the trust of your customers.  That’s terrifying, but that’s the reality.

 

Survey Shows Employees Would Compromise Company Data

A recent report published by nCipher confirms what many business owners have known for a long time.  Their employees are the weakest link when it comes to data security.

The nCipher report, however, adds a disturbing exclamation point to the data with a few details you’re likely to find shocking.

First, fully 71 percent of C-Suite employees surveyed in the UK would knowingly and willingly cover up a data breach if doing so meant escaping the fines associated with it.  This, contrasted with just 57 percent of managers and directions.  The latter number is still distressingly high, but nothing compared with the C-suite.

Second, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it’s just the people you have installed in the corner office that are willing to put your business at risk. A disappointing 25 percent of office employees indicated that they’d be willing to sell corporate information for as little as £1000, with 5 percent of office employees saying that they’d simply give it away for free.  10 percent said they’d need at least £250 to make it worth their while.

Dan Turner, the CEO of Deep Secure, had this to say on reading the report:

“The cost of employee loyalty is staggeringly low.  With nearly half of all office workers admitting they would sell their company’s and clients’ most sensitive and valuable information, the business risk is not only undisputable, but immense in the age of GDPR and where customers no longer tolerate data breaches.

Given the prevalent use of digital and cyber tactics to exfiltrate this information, it’s critical that businesses invest in a security posture that will help them both detect and prevent company information from leaving the network.”

Wise words indeed. Unfortunately, given the realities above, that means keeping a closer eye on your own people.