By Shane Butcher | March 18, 2020

Cybersecurity During Coronavirus Pandemic

A note from the OGO Cybersecurity office on scams and best practices during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

While preparing for the pandemic in your area, we need to ensure security is still considered in all our activities. When allowing employees to work remotely, we should confirm that the security tools that we install will work when not directly connected to our networks.  Ideally patch management, anti-malware updates, security policies and system updates should work either through a secure web connection or your VPN connection.  We need to ensure that employees have access to what they need remotely and no more.  Remote connections should use multi-factor authentication and utilizing VDI or allowing the employee to remote into their desktop at the office are great options if available.

We also need to ensure we continue to communicate with employees about security best practices. Working remotely provides additional risks.  Employees should not leave their computer unlocked and unattended.  Employees need to be cognizant about who and what has a view of their screen if working with non-public information.  There are numerous phishing campaigns circulating claiming to have information on the pandemic, we need to remind employees of basic security practices.  Don’t click on links or open documents you are not expecting.  When in doubt, contact the sender or go directly to the organizations website without click on a link.  Of particular concern, there is malicious website pretending to be the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus map.  When someone visits this site, it downloads the AZORult trojan, which is an information stealing trojan.  This site is being spread through a number of channels including malicious emails.

For additional information on best practices for VPN and COVID-19 phishing scams, you can check out these articles on our website.

• https://ongoingoperations.com/2020/03/11/coronavirus-phishing-scams-cybersecurity-for-credit-unions/
• https://ongoingoperations.com/2020/03/11/remote-access-vpn-best-practices-for-credit-unions/

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

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