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With most people working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, experts say the job to detect, contain, and deconstruct cyberattacks is more complex, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Moving workers onto home Wi-Fi networks, and sometimes onto personal devices, have limited cyber teams’ ability to respond to intrusions during the pandemic.
The damage disproportionately falls on businesses whose cybersecurity teams are tethered to physical offices, Augusto Barros, a security and risk analyst for Gartner Inc., told the WSJ.
As many organizations are cash-strapped, investing in new threat-detection tools and more flexible security teams might be a harder sell.
“It’ll make a bad problem worse,” Barros told the paper. “Those that did their homework on improving incident response [before the pandemic] will be in a far better position.”
Law enforcement agencies around the world warned organizations that cyber threats were increasing as the coronavirus spread.
Facing extra steps in remotely accessing data, lag time from outside cybersecurity teams hired to investigate breaches can hamper subsequent police investigations. The authorities increasingly rely on private companies to share evidence, according to the WSJ.
According to the report, experts say the effect of the slowdown in investigating breaches will grow this summer.
Hackers often lurk inside networks for weeks or months before security teams spot them. This “dwell time” could mean that companies might soon discover attackers who infiltrated their systems in March and April during the height of the pandemic chaos, Charles Carmakal, CTO of cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc.’s consulting arm, told the WSJ.
“It’s usually around three months or so that an attacker has access to organizations before the organization detects it,” Carmakal said in the report. “We’re getting to be right around that time.”
Read more at wsj.com (subscription required).
