Thought about upping the ante on your security protocols? Control employee access through the identity of the user’s device rather than just the identity of the user.

In 2021, the world saw a rise in security breaches on a national and global scale. Data leaks and compromised systems resulted in data and revenue losses and put millions of users at risk.

The possible cause of these events: Working from home. Covid-19 pushed nearly 42 percent of the U.S. labor force to work from home full-time.  Consequentially, working from home lacks the robust security infrastructure an in-office environment provides. Because of this, many hackers found an opening to attack through in-home offices, as there were more chances of human error and weak cybersecurity systems.

Now in 2021,  breaches are only continuing to grow.  In Sonic-wall’s mid-year update, there were over 2.5 billion malware attacks and 304.7 million ransomware attacks in the first half of 2021 alone. Incidents like these may continue to increase until the end of the year, and it’s best to learn from the major events to prevent them from happening to you.

Let’s dive right in: 

Contract engineering teams consist of workers who only work for a short while. In a situation where you are cycling in and out numerous employees during a season, there may be a potential for breaches and malware.

Contractors coming in from everywhere and going anywhere have access to highly valuable information and systems. This leaves your company vulnerable to a breach during their employment and even after they leave.

For example, in 2017, an ex-employee of Tesla hacked the company's confidential and trade secret information, transferring the data to third parties by placing software on the computer system that would continue to run even when the employee left the company.

Julie Villanueva

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a system that allows you to encrypt and sign data for better security purposes. PKI certificates digitally authenticate the identity of a user in order to ensure safe use of an account, device or service. PKI provides a safer way for a known user to securely connect to both public systems like web pages, as well as private systems like VPN’s, Wi-Fi® and other forms of multi-factored authentication systems.

Usernames and passwords are becoming a thing of the past for modern businesses. PKI certificates at the same time are becoming more prevalent and cost-effective giving more reason for companies to throw out the standard username and password as their authentication mechanism.