Covid-19 pandemic made people around the world hygiene such as keeping social distance, wearing masks, washing hands with soap, and using sanitizer. Due to Covid-19 work from home also come into existence.
To maintain a workforce completely remote is new to many businesses around the world. Organizations had to reconstruct strategies to make their IT Infrastructure fully available from anywhere they are working from as well as to making cybersecurity is a major concern. Due to increased dependency on digital payment platforms due to the Covid-19 pandemic, financial frauds have progressed. Due to limited awareness and cyber hygiene, there is a 500% increase in cybercrimes.
Cyber hygiene or cybersecurity hygiene means the best use that computer system administrators, and users should undertake to improve cybersecurity when they are engaged in online activities such as emailing, texting, web browsing, work from home. Due to the pandemic, people now focus on online activities like shopping, performing all financial transactions, purchase of goods and services, attending meeting online, and collaborating online. As a result, cyber threats and cyber thefts are more.
Common types of cyber threats include password theft, theft of information, identity theft, internet time thefts. So to minimize or avoid these types of theft is most important for the IT department as well as the employees in an organization. To maintaining cyber hygiene the end-users should be educated on practicing good cyber behavior such as password management, MFA (Multi-Factor authentication), identify the phishing efforts, which devices to connect to the network, what information to download.
While installing software make sure it from a trusted site. Keeping a copy as well as backing up of data is very important. Users should use a safer cloud service to store the data and backups should be done periodically and ensured especially when cloud backup has been synchronized as a default mechanism. IT companies will update their software with new patch releases regularly should be adhered to.
Should install and maintain a secure IP (Internet Protocol) router and a robust firewall that restricts unauthorized persons from accessing data, web browsers, applications, emails. A work-from-home employee has to use a secure VPN (Virtual Private Network).
When selling and disposing of computers or any storage devices securely erase or delete all the persistent data stored. Just deleting files is not sufficient as they can be recovered by hackers and forensic specialists. Organizations have to give proper training to employees on regular basis to make them aware of cyber hygiene.
