Massive use of work from home due to coronavirus crisis opens the door for “hackers”: experts

By Steven Scheer and Raphael Satter

TEL AVIV / WASHINGTON, Mar 18 (Reuters) – The move of people to their homes to work and study due to the coronavirus epidemic, carrying their laptops and their business data with them, invites hackers to seek out advantage and infiltrate corporations, cybersecurity experts warned.

Authorities from the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries have issued warnings about the dangers of a new remote workforce, while technology companies see an increase in requests to protect employees who work from outside offices.

At Cisco Systems Inc, for example, the number of requests for security support to help remote workers has increased 10-fold in recent weeks.

“People who have never worked from home before are trying to do it and are trying to do it on a large scale,” said Wendy Nather, an adviser to Cisco Duo Security, who has spent the past decade working from home in various jobs.

She said the sudden transition will mean more room for error, more weight on IT staff, and more opportunities for cybercriminals to try to trick employees into revealing their passwords.

Criminals disguise your messages and malicious software to steal passwords like coronavirus alerts, warnings, or apps.

Some researchers have found hackers posing as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an attempt to access emails or cheat bitcoin users, while others have seen “hackers” using applications to take control of Android phones.

Advanced cyber spies also appear to be exploiting the coronavirus outbreak that has infected https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 to more than 210,000 and killed more than 8,700 worldwide.

Last week, the Israeli research company Check Point discovered suspected government-backed hackers using a booby-trapped update on the coronavirus to try to access an unidentified Mongolian government network.

On Friday, U.S. cybersecurity authorities released a recommendation to companies to update their Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and to be on the lookout for an increase in malicious emails targeting a disoriented workforce.

Cybercriminals are alert to the work-from-home trend “and are doing what they can to use it to infiltrate organizations,” said Esti Peshin, head of the cybersecurity division of state-run Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel’s largest defense contractor. .

(Report by Steven Scheer in Tel Aviv and Raphael Satter in Washington; Additional report by Jack Stubbs in London; Edited in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)