Page 23 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2020 Edition

Post-COVID-19 Cybersecurity Predictions

By Ilia Sotnikov, Vice President of Product Management, Netwrix

Lots of pundits are speculating about what effects the COVID-19 pandemic will have on the economy,
social behavior, politics and related topics. Today, however, let’s focus on how the IT threat landscape is
likely to evolve. I don’t envision a dramatic shift in the makeup of cybersecurity threats; rather, I predict
an acceleration of important trends we have already been battling. Here are the key threats I predict will
increase during the global lockdown and beyond.

More remote employees will mean more insider threats.

Remote work is here to stay. Some organizations will stay fully remote while others will make it optional,
but all IT teams will have to adapt to the new reality of a larger remote workforce and lack of control over
more endpoints and network devices.
From a cybersecurity standpoint, they will have to regard each remote worker as a potential threat,
capable of both malicious actions of their own and negligence that opens the door to attackers getting
inside the network. Therefore, organizations will have to develop new security strategies that reduce risk
to an acceptable level, possibly using a zero trust model. They will need to pay special attention to the
security and privacy of sensitive data, for example, by enforcing measures to prevent this data from
spreading across employee endpoints and cloud collaboration tools.

Cyber Defense eMagazine –June 2020 Edition 23
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