A recent WSJ article highlighted concerns that employees working from home are providing a far greater opportunity for hackers to attack the businesses they work for.
Even before the lockdown, the threat of “negligent insiders” accidentally allowing hackers into companies was rising fast, costing a business $4.6M per year on average. It’s no surprise that cyberattacks have soared 60% since the pandemic.
The truth is companies have no way of knowing if staff are ignoring best practices, lending their work devices to their partner or kids, or unsafely storing sensitive information.
So how can companies truly protect themselves?
Preventing Hacks That Prey On Fear
We’re all operating in an increasingly turbulent world – one where remote work seems to be here to stay. But while being distanced doesn’t necessarily hamper productivity, there is a pervasive uncertainty where security is concerned.
Hackers know this and are unscrupulous enough to prey on the fact many people are still adjusting to working from home. This is why both large and small businesses need to step up their approach to cybersecurity.
Considering up to 80% of security breaches are blamed on human error, it’s clear people are the weakest link. That’s why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to make waves in this area.
Security At Scale
The AI capabilities built into Microsoft Security solutions are trained on 8 trillion daily threat signals and the insights of 3,500 security experts. Custom algorithms and machine learning models make and learn from, billions of queries every day.
As a result, Microsoft Security solutions help identify and respond to threats 50% faster than was possible just 12 months ago.
In this way, using a tech platform like this, employees have peace of mind that if they open something that breaches security, the network will put the brakes on, and protect both the employee and the business in a secure cloud environment.
A Business Imperative
Ultimately, it’s up to each individual business to ensure their data is secure, no matter where employees are based. But by having a cloud-based solution, businesses can centralise their employee’s devices and manage user permissions and applications to secure data.
This can all be achieved through Microsoft 365 – along with AI-powered tools like Windows Defender that pick up on unusual behaviour, can dynamically identify new threats, and work with large sets of interconnected data.
With cloud-delivered protection, next-generation technologies provide rapid identification of new threats, sometimes even before a single machine is infected.
It’s clear that – through simply being human – employees are the weakest link in a company’s security chain. But hackers have become so ingenious that even tech-savvy executives have been tricked by personalised emails that appear to come from credible senders.
However, AI can’t be compromised in the same way.
