How to Prevent Phishing Attacks in Remote World

Phishing attacks are becoming more and more prominent every day; especially with the growing adoption of the remote world model. You may think that phishing attacks are not a big deal when you’re in-office with all the people you know and communicate instantly. But they become a huge problem for work from home employees who may be located even overseas. 

Preventing such attacks is critical to protecting a company’s information integrity and overall success. In a remote world with a greatly diverse workforce, let’s see how you can do that. 

What is a Phishing Attack?

Phishing attacks are social engineering attacks in which their perpetrators mislead certain people to share credentials or even directly sensitive information. These attacks are usually done via emails where they tell people to click a specific link which then sets up malware or compromises network integrity. 

Phishing attacks can be caused for both technical and educational reasons. First, employees might not know how to verify the sources of the emails they got. Secondly, these emails might harm the company network because of a technical lack of capability. 

According to IBM’s report, 85% of phishing attacks target credentials. These attacks directly aim to steal the sensitive data of a company, which usually includes customer information, and that’s why companies should be aware of the threat. A successful phishing attack can cause legal issues, profit loss, and a bad brand reputation. 

Also, Read to Know: Network Security: What is SASE?

Ways to Prevent Phishing Attacks in the Remote World

We are going towards a world where workforces are increasingly remote and companies hire employees from a variety of countries. In such a professional world, how can they prevent phishing attacks? Let’s see the working from home security best practices to help them out. 

1-) Security Awareness Training

The first thing to look for is an obvious one but is usually overlooked. You need to have a comprehensive and educational training session conducted by your IT security departments. This training will help your employees to separate a credible email from a phishing one and will give them an overall idea of how to act online.

You just want to make sure that they understand the complexity of modern phishing attacks and they know where to report them in case they get any. 

2-) Implement Email Filtering

Since the majority of phishing attacks come from emails, you need to set up a defense system, especially for the email addresses of your employees. For example, you can implement a secure email gateway to support your email protection. 

The employees will never be as knowledgeable on cybersecurity as IT staff, so you need to make sure they don’t get malicious emails in the first place. A proper secure email gateway can almost eliminate the risk of getting an actual phishing email.

3-) Secure BYOD Devices

Ensuring the security of BYOD devices is a crucial aspect of remote work model phishing attack protection. In most cases, employees who work with their personal devices are at risk of compromising the company network because of potential applications on their computers. 

To secure these devices, companies should use security services that constantly monitor access and disconnects the user from corporate resources in case of a privacy breach. They can be acquired online and in the cloud easily so you don’t have to set them up yourself. 

4-) Conduct Regular Phishing Simulations

One way to protect your employees from phishing attacks is actually having them detect a malicious email. You probably want to do this more than one time since there are several methods of phishing attacks such as spear phishing, whaling, or smishing. 

The best thing to do when it comes to phishing attacks is to ensure the potential victim, your employees, are able to understand the issue before going any further with the phishing emails. So, if your remote employees can detect them, they will add a new layer of security just by doing so.

5-) Website Filtering

Some cybersecurity professionals believe that most companies are under phishing attack risks because of unrestricted access to various websites. Website filtering allows companies to scan pages and detect their risk level to decide whether they can be accessed or not. 

This process will help your employees not to get into malicious websites which look regular but collects information in the background or maybe even deploy malware to your employee’s computer. Limiting the websites is a good idea to isolate your network from the outer threats. 

Summary

Phishing attacks will always be there if people become victims of these attacks and share sensitive data. The duty of the companies to protect their networks is to take precautions against this issue and train their employees first. Of course, they also need to adopt the necessary tools to make it easier for their employees. 

Next, don’t forget to read this: Data You Should Never Store in the Cloud

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