The rapid shift to work-from-home models has largely been successful, enabling public- and private-sector organizations to keep functioning and meet social distancing requirements. The benefits have been so great that many organizations plan to offer remote work options after the pandemic has abated. A Cisco survey conducted between June and September 2020 found that 37 percent of organizations expect to continue work-from-home arrangements long-term.
Cybersecurity
Email remains a primary vector for cybersecurity threats. According to the Verizon Data Breach Incident Report, 94 percent of malware is spread via email, and phishing accounts for 80 percent of social engineering attacks. Losses associated with phishing attacks averaged $17,700 per minute in 2019, according to data from RiskIQ.
Despite the digitization of many business processes, workers still need to print, scan, fax and copy documents. However, employees working from home no longer have access to the business machines in the office. This has led to a surge in demand for home office printers and multifunction devices (MFDs).
Cybercrime is big business. A recent study by Atlas VPN found that cybercriminals rake in more than $1.5 trillion in revenue annually — triple the earnings of retail giant Walmart. If you count all the global costs of cybercrime, it would be equivalent to the world’s third-largest economy, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
A new report paints a grim picture of industrial control system (ICS) cyber security. According to the Claroty Biannual ICS Risk & Vulnerability Report, 365 ICS vulnerabilities were disclosed in the first half of 2020, 75 percent of which were rated as high or critical using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). These vulnerabilities were most prevalent in ICSs used in critical infrastructure, including the energy and critical manufacturing sectors.
