Yep! I’m Working from Home for the first time.

Now that the #COVID19 pandemic has truly gripped the planet, lots of employers are asking their employees to work from home. If you’re in the situation for the first time your employer probably has provided you with a laptop or a tablet, or some device to be able to do this work from home.

If they have done this they probably also have given you some kind of secure way of connecting into the company emails and into the company file data storage. Your IT support might also have given you guidance on things you need to do to keep that machine safe and secure while you’re working from home. So please do follow those guidelines.

So Working from Home and Data Protection, what do I gotta do?

But if you’re working with personal data you really, really want to be very careful about that device and how you use this device in your working from home environment. For example you might have younger people in the house and it can be very tempting to let them play with this device or use this device to access the internet, when you’re not working with it. You must resist that temptation because that device contains potentially sensitive data. You cannot let the young people get access to that data. It must be kept secure.

What about paper personal data?

Similarly if you were printing things at home and particularly if you’re printing sensitive personal data, so things like health information or religious, political persuasions, that type of information.

Sensitive Personal Data:

• Race/Ethnic origin
• Political Opinions
• Religious/Philosophical beliefs
• Trade Union Membership
• Physical/Mental Health
• Sexual Orientation/Sex Life
• Genetic data
• Biometric data

If you’re going to print that out at home you really need to be able to secure those printouts, those hard copies appropriately and as securely as it would be in the office. So you really shouldn’t want to be printing that stuff out.

So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

www.L2CyberSecurity.com

www.twitter.com/L2Cyber

The post #WeekendWisdom 020 Working from Home and Data Protection appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

Now that Coronavirus has been declared a pandemic, people are going to be having a sense of fear, uncertainty and doubt all across the world about this and how it might affect them and their families, which is understandable.

So what type of Coronavirus Scams are there?

This is what the criminals are going to try now and exploit. The desire for people to get more and more information about Coronavirus. So they will send out lots and lots of emails to everybody with links or buttons that you need to click or there will be documents or PDFs attached to those emails.

And they will be encouraging you to open these by saying “important information here from the WHO” or your national health organisation. And they’re expecting you to click on those and these will then compromise your computer.

So don’t fall for these type of information scams. Your national health organisation will probably communicate with you through the normal national media. So get your news from reputable sources.

Anything else?

Also there might be attempts to scam people who are in a work from home situation and that they’re out of their usual zone and they’re communicating in slightly different ways with their colleagues.

So you might end up receiving an email from a colleague with some instruction maybe to make a payment or again open an attachment that might be compromised. This email will come maybe from a personal email account and not the normal corporate email account.

So if you get instructions like that in a work from home environment, call that colleague and verify the instruction is valid.

So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

www.L2CyberSecurity.com

www.twitter.com/L2Cyber

The post #WeekendWisdom 019 Coronavirus Scams appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..

Pandemic Preparation – extras for Business Continuity Planning:

So in a pandemic situation, there are three items that you might want to additionally consider over and above your normal business continuity planning.

1 – Availability of key personnel

The first one is the availability of key personnel. How would you be able to continue to provide goods and services to your clients if certain key personnel were unavailable due to illness?

2 – Reduced supplier capacity

Similarly your suppliers. If your suppliers are only producing at a reduced capacity, are you going to be able to continue to do what you need to do for your clients?

3 – Set client expectations

Thirdly, on that basis, you should probably talk to your clients about what your plans are for the production of your goods and services that they get from you.

What about the technology side:

From a technology perspective then, if you have to capability for staff to work from home and that will keep you going that’s great.

Test work-from-home technology

But you should really test that situation now, before things become a crisis. So perhaps have all your staff, some evening at home, they all access the systems at the same time. As if it was during the working day and then see if your systems can handle it.

Get staff comfortable with tools

if you’re using Microsoft Office 365 or Google Gsuite or other collaboration tools, they’re great for people working from home, but make sure your staff are comfortable using them. So get them to test them now, in the office and get comfortable with them.

Don’t use personal email

Don’t encourage staff to use personal email accounts for communicating in a work from home situation because there might be security and GDPR considerations there.

Watch out for “crisis” scams

And finally you want to make sure to watch out for additional scams that people might try to perpetrate in this time of crisis.

So that’s it for this week. Let’s be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.

www.L2CyberSecurity.com

www.twitter.com/L2Cyber

The post #WeekendWisdom 018 Pandemic Preparation appeared first on L2 Cyber Security Solutions Ltd..