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Webinar Series Focuses on COVID-19 Cybersecurity

April 16, 2020
ECIA and The Trust Bridge are hosting a series of webinars to help their members to manage and mitigate cybersecurity risks.

Cyber hacking is one sector that is thriving with the dramatic shift in employees working from home during the COVID-19 crisis. A joint alert from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns, “Both CISA and NCSC are seeing a growing use of COVID-19-related themes by malicious cyber actors. At the same time, the surge in teleworking has increased the use of potentially vulnerable services, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), amplifying the threat to individuals and organizations.” 

In an effort to guide members on how to manage and mitigate these accelerating risks, ECIA has enlisted its partner The Trust Bridge to host a series of timely and practical webinars, titled Safer Remote Working.

The first webinar focused on cyber hygiene. Francis West, a cyber security advocate from Westtek Solutions identified the substantial risk to the company network that arises from adding a host of personal devices to the corporate network, as workers have moved their offices to their homes en masse. Hackers are having a field day as they recognize that their task of finding the most vulnerable entry point into a corporation’s data has just gotten an order of magnitude easier. 

“Just in the last week, we in the U.K. have seen a 660% increase in the number of scams that are tracked by NCSC,” cautioned West. “Ransomware attacks have increased astronomically. Connecting to a VPN from your home computer doesn’t protect you. It just makes it possible to ‘securely’ transfer an attack that comes in from your son’s gaming community straight to the company network,” he lamented.

The webinar includes many recommendations that companies can enact immediately to dramatically reduce risk.

Other topics covered in the webinar series include how to manage internal communications in remote working; how to inventory and protect data assets; how people can maximize their individual online presence; and much more.

“These webinars have been recorded and can be shared within our members’ organizations,” noted Debbie Conyers, ECIA Vice President of Member Engagement. “Experts predict that this dramatic change in how companies are doing business will not completely reverse. The expectation is that these new remote communications protocols will need to be in place, in some cases permanently. It’s important to think through how it will affect employee productivity and data asset security and learn how to most effectively manage it all sooner rather than later.”

Access the webinar recordings at the ECIA website.

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