Why working from home is not a perfect idea, especially for organizations that handle sensitive data. Home networks versus corporate networks are different in many ways. We will present an ideal scenario to substantiate our confirmation.
An estimated 7.5 million dollars was transferred to a new international account from The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington in Maryland, US. This is from the official statement of the non-profit organization CEO Gil Preuss submitted to Washington Post and announced to its employees to report the intrusion and seek assistance from the government.
Maryland Non-Profit is an organization that helps people and other non-profit organizations to devise a scheme to strengthen oneself in aiming good life. They are funded through donations wherein they use it for their advocacy and programs giving aid through money and intellectual resource not only in Maryland but also other less fortunate communities in the US and abroad.
According to the report, the intrusion was unraveled on August 4 by a security expert that spotted an anomaly on an employee’s email account. Initial investigation shows that the personal computer of the victim has been compromised since the start of summer this year. Due to the pandemic, most of the 52 employees of Maryland Non-Profit organization is working from home with the use of their personal computer where few of them have access to the organization’s funds.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and hired cybersecurity experts are now on the trace for an in-depth analysis of the situation and possibly identifying the threat actors, including the scheme used to compromise the victim’s computer. Currently, they have verified that a specific agency under the organization umbrella was the only one that has been compromised and other funds on other agencies are entirely intact. The collaboration will perform a full audit of the system network from servers to devices. It will work a mitigation plan to completely stop the further intrusion and avoid future attacks on the company. Currently, employees are now halted to use their computers for work-related transactions. FBI and the organization already sealed off information on further commentary on the issue and status of the investigation. The organization wished to have a faster conclusion on this issue to focus more on other essential aspects of its purpose.
This reported issue is just an addition to the growing statistics projected that may happen since most businesses, government, and other prominent entities will be performing work remotely.
In the US alone, a submitted study shows that almost 20 percent out of 200 security experts that have been interviewed confirmed that they have suffered network hack within the past 5 months on the pandemic period resulting from people working from home.
Since networks from home are unprotected, cybercriminals have used this weakness to exploit the victim’s system and use it as its gateway to its primary target: the victim’s company resources. This was released to give awareness to people to be more vigilant and proactively check to understand the possibility of exposure to hackers from the convenience of our home.
