Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 41 | Page 52

Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + ANNA COLLARD, MD A KNOWBE4 AFRICA My husband was genuinely surprised at the high performance of his business’s call centre staff working from home. Facebook and Google both announced that they will have their people work from home for the rest of this year. The current shift in thinking is not limited to remote working but comes with a higher trust in people, it seems. Security teams had to become more agile overnight and rethink how to make remote working a reality. They also have to prepare for a new ‘normal’ after lockdown ends. The speed at which Digital Transformation is happening is certainly a positive side effect of the current situation. Yes, it’s government restrictions and fear of infections that are keeping us at home at the moment. But remote working has also shown efficiencies such as the worldwide adoption of video conferencing, which has reduced the need for business travel. Conferences have gone virtual. Remote working allows employees more flexibility and less time wasted in traffic. At the same time, the rush to remote working has made us more vulnerable to risks. Projects that usually take months of careful planning and change management had to be squeezed into a few weeks or even just days. Many remote workers are using their home or personal devices to connect to the company network. Kids distract their parents at home and many parents have to share their work devices for online schooling. This makes them more likely to fall for phishing attacks, which have increased dramatically in the first quarter of this year. Old school VPN technology allows untrusted devices full access to internal networks without checking for possible infections. Often the flat nature of these networks increases the risk of malware p lateral movement onc Poorly configured colla lead to potentially exp information. These sa are now under attack Users are being targe notifications or Zoom them into submitting User education and aw critical in times like the people’s behaviour to Most dangers can be a some very basic princip www.intelligentcio.com