Businesses now have the green light to go back to work, but your organisation may not be returning to its old working practices. So, if a hybrid model is being adopted, what can you do to ensure that information stays secure?

The introduction of more widespread homeworking has certainly piled on the pressure for businesses’ IT security.
At the beginning of 2021, QMS International carried out a survey of businesses about their cyber security and 75.7% of the respondents reported that they now felt more open to attack. Another 10% reported that they had no confidence in fending one off.
And businesses have a right to be worried. According to analysis of reports made to the UK’s Information Commissioners Office (ICO) by CybSafe, the number of ransomware incidents in the first half of 2021 doubled compared to the number reported in the first half of 2020.

Malicious emails have also been redirected to attack those working from home. Data supplied by Darktrace to The Guardian revealed that the proportion of attacks targeting home workers rose from 12% of malicious email traffic before the first lockdown in March 2020 to more than 60% six weeks later. With homeworking becoming more of a permanent fixture in business models, this trend is likely to continue.
While hybrid working offers your team the best of both worlds when it comes to office and home working, it also leaves your business open to the unique risks associated with both, with the added bonus of those linked to transport and travel.

But this doesn’t mean you have to abandon this new way of working. With the right processes in place, you can ensure your information stays secure, no matter where your staff are based.

Carry out a risk assessment
First things first – you must carry out a risk assessment.

Knowing the precise risks your business faces is key to developing methods of removing or mitigating them, but assessments like this are often overlooked. In fact, QMS’ cyber report found that 30% of respondents admitted that no new information security risk assessments had been carried out, despite changes to working practices.
Discover the risks, analyse their likelihood, and then decide if and how they can be controlled. This will give you the grounding you need to build your wider hybrid IT strategy.

Train and test your team
With cyber-attacks on the rise and remote workers being more vulnerable, it’s crucial that your hybrid team know what to look for and, just as crucially, how to report anything suspicious. The best way to do this is through training, which can now be carried out very effectively via e-learning.
This training should cover common cyber-attacks – such as phishing emails – how to spot them, the fundamentals of social engineering, and how to report suspicious activity. Ideally, this training should be refreshed regularly as new cyber threats emerge. You may also like to include training on the safe use of video calls and how to ensure video cameras are switched off when not in use.

To ensure your team have absorbed what they’ve learnt, carry out penetration testing. This involves crafting fake phishing emails and sending them out to your employees. What they do will give you an idea of whether your training has been effective.

Address access
When your hybrid team aren’t in the workplace, they will need to access servers and files remotely. This will often be via a VPN (Virtual Private Network), so you need to ensure that this is as secure as possible.

Remote workers will also be relying on their home Wi-Fi, but this may not be as secure as the Wi-Fi in your office. Your team should therefore be encouraged to create strong passwords – not the default ones on the base of the router.

Workers need to be cautioned against the use of free Wi-Fi hotspots too. It’s possible that your workers may want to use it to work on the train, for example, or in a coffee shop. However, public Wi-Fi is notoriously unsecure, and your workers should be cautioned against using it.