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COVID-19 Creates Fresh Cyber Security Challenges as Employees Work From Home

The Threat

The recent surge in Work-From-Home, triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, is here to stay and the first sign of it is that "WFH" has been added to the alphabet soup of jargons crowding the technology industry. WFH, however, has also created a fresh set of challenges for organizations to protect their intellectual assets from cyberattacks. It’s a no-brainer to say that our home networks are far more vulnerable than enterprise networks. Companies are leveraging this crisis to meet immediate needs as well as for building more lasting, longer-term access to a variety of resources in the cloud as well as in the enterprise data center.

As the world logs on to enterprise networks from home, the demand for more secure remote access for employees is at an all-time high. Organizations must prepare for possible cyberattacks on our home IT networks to exploit its vulnerabilities. They need to monitor IT use for signs of malicious behaviour, safeguard sensitive data and assure maximum compliance with privacy and regulatory requirements. Also, the extensive use of cloud services necessitated by the COVID-19 crisis, both on-premise and public, will compel enterprises to reassess this ecosystem and take additional steps to protect it.

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What Is Cybersecurity Research Today?

Cybersecurity research has, it seems, two main thrusts. Both of them seem similar at first glance, but one is more lucrative (though not as impactful) while the other has much more impact (but doesn't seem to pull in the cash). Let's give an overview of various cybersecurity careers first, and then segue into what cyber R&D is today.

From a career perspective, you can first split jobs into either offensive or defensive specialties. Now, granted, this is a somewhat artificial delineation. After all, if you work in any corporate cybersecurity department, you've got someone either on staff or on call that can analyze suspected malware or do some post-incident forensics. But generally, offensive folks do things like pen testing and vulnerability analysis while defensive folks implement and monitor cybersecurity controls and policies in organizations. We can include forensics work and malware analysis as defensive fields. They're not a perfect fit, but as they're not focused specifically on attacking systems, let's lump them in with defensive fields.