How Covid-19 Drastically Changed the Cybersecurity Landscape?

Leaders in security and risk management must now protect their organizations on a large scale and quickly. They must ensure that their companies' online services and digital platforms are resistant to cyberattacks.

FREMONT, CA: The pandemic has created a huge challenge for companies all over the world: how to continue operating despite massive closures of offices and other facilities. The information technology on which they have long relied – their data centers, departmental servers, cloud systems, and the digital devices on which their now-disconnected employees rely to stay connected to each other and to the company's data – becomes even more critical. The demands put on digital infrastructure have skyrocketed overnight.

Such technology also makes cyber criminals a much larger and more lucrative target. Cybersecurity efforts must be improved to prevent a second crisis from arising: on digital devices and networks, which have become infinitely more important to businesses in recent weeks. To put it another way, "business continuity" has become a requirement.

Increasing Cyber Risks in the Covid-19 Pandemic

The explosion in communications and the widespread shift to conducting business online has increased the risk of cyberattacks by order of magnitude. They have also introduced a slew of new dangers. The perimeter security of organizations is at risk of being violated. They require continuous monitoring and real-time risk analysis for violations at both physical and digital entry points.

Leaders in security and risk management must now protect their organizations on a large scale and quickly. They must ensure that their companies' online services and digital platforms are resistant to cyberattacks.

The IT function is still under a lot of scrutinies. IT professionals in some companies must extend remote working capabilities to workers who have never worked from home before. This may include their service providers in some cases. Many IT departments are in the process of implementing new collaboration software. While this is important for keeping employees synchronized (especially in agile teams), it also increases the risk of sensitive data being hacked in less secure remote workplaces.

However, it is difficult for IT departments to say no to this. Access to internal services and applications is required for company leaders, managers, and their staff to conduct operations remotely. Because many businesses have not previously made these applications and data available via the Internet or virtual private networks (VPN), security leaders are hesitant to allow access without strict access mechanisms.

Understandably, very few companies were prepared for a large portion of their workforce to work remotely. They are now aware that secure remote-access capacity and protected access to enterprise systems have become a significant constraint.

It is impossible to enforce business security policies and controls on the remote workforce. Most controls have limited scalability and take a long time to deploy. We are aware of some companies that have had to allow employees to use personal digital devices to access enterprise applications because there was no mechanism in place to enforce security controls. Most companies' business continuity plans (BCP) and incident response plans (IRP) for dealing with pandemics are insufficient or non-existent. Security officials had never expected or tested such a large-scale BCP operation.

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