Page 31 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for July 2020

Simplifying personal endpoint device protection is also imperative. Managing protection for many
devices, given scarce resources, demands centralized management from a single pane of glass
to provide real time protection and on-demand remediation. Many SMBs may also consider
outsourcing their security needs to a managed service provider (MSP) in order to free up
resources, but this should not take the place of employee security training.

Apply Privacy Protection. As users work from home, they need an extra layer of protection to stop
cyberattack risk – as they are no longer behind the security of your corporate network. This is
where the value of a virtual private network (VPN) comes into play. This important, and often
overlooked, layer of defense ensures that a users’ IP address is private, secure, and encrypted,
helping to protect your business data.

Serving as a digital middleman between the user and the Internet, a VPN can deter hacking and
unauthorized tracking which will help prevent employees from being cyberthreat targets. It works
like an encrypted tunnel between the user and your data, keeping away the prying eyes of threat
actors looking to access your business data – including passwords, personally identifiable
information (PII), customer information, credit card numbers and more. By employing a VPN, you
can limit the risk of employees working from their personal networks while protecting critical
business and customer information.

Post-COVID Environment

Eventually employees will begin returning to work onsite, but this crisis has demonstrated the benefits of
working at home. This means that the heightened use of personal devices for business is here to stay.
SMBs can manage this new working reality by improving employee communication on threat prevention,
creating a strategy to more thoroughly record and protect assets, and implementing the protection of a
VPN to keep important business data away from prying eyes.

In the longer term, all these security measures are going to be critical to economic viability.
Cybercriminals have been exploiting COVID-19, but they will revert back to other forms of cybercrime soon
enough and ransomware attacks, costly data breaches and business disruption will be back in the news.
SMBs can avoid tragedy by implementing strong preventative anti-attack measures now.

About the Author
Akshay Bhargava is the Chief Product Officer at Malwarebytes, a leading
provider of advanced endpoint protection and remediation solutions.

Cyber Defense eMagazine –July 2020 Edition 31
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