Impact on Technology
Many businesses have activated contingency and business continuity measures to allow employees to work from home to limit the spread of the virus. A significant number of remotely connected employees, for an extended period, may put a strain on your network.
Furthermore, as Cayman businesses and employees are determining the potential impacts of COVID-19 on their operations, some cybercriminals are exploiting the hysteria. There are reports of phishing emails masquerading as guidance about COVID-19, as hackers disguise malware in email attachments purporting to contain information to protect against its spread.
Risk Response
- Assess whether security settings for remote connections and secured individual access mechanisms are in place and operating effectively.
- Determine sufficiency of network capabilities if a large number of employees are expected to be working remotely for an extended period.
- Enable staff to utilize equipment and tools to maximize their productivity while working remotely, such as video calling, cloud-based collaboration software, and online document authoring.
- Consider moving appropriate applications and decision support systems to the cloud to enhance your ability to not only manage through difficult times, but also harness the innovation, compliance and security features provided by global public cloud vendors.
- Adopt and/or verify enforcement of multi-factor authentication for employees who are logging into the company network.
- Review communications and information technology infrastructures as needed to support employee telecommuting and remote customer access.
- Enhance user awareness of cyber-attacks and provide frequent alerts to employees to enhance cyber vigilance.
- Educate employees on red flags to look out for within phishing emails.
- Practice consistency in communication methods and protocols to heighten an employee’s awareness of phishing attempts.
- Monitor the use of unauthorised computers (especially for companies that have adopted a Bring Your Own Device policy) and their access to the network.
- Review the data backup policy and the frequency