Due to coronavirus out brake millions of people from one day to another started working from home using various tools and applications. It happened almost overnight with very little time to prepare.

Speaking about preparation I mean companies IT/Sec divisions – in my opinion in at least 70% of the cases the companies were not prepared for working remotely at such a scale. Out of the sudden whole companies are working in the cloud with virtually no tools, policies or experience to manage it. Also the employees weren’t prepared. They didn’t know, how to use the tools, what VPN is etc. I personally met people claiming to have had worked from home overnights, coming to the help-desk to have their VPN client installed or to learn how to connect to the personal hotspot on their company cell phone 😉

After a couple of weeks the situation hasn’t improved much 🙂 It just happened to quick to catch up. Years of underinvestment in security tools and employees education cannot be worked out in a couple of weeks. Untrained employees are really acting crazy when working from home. Believe me, I see it every day.

However, what seems like a nightmare for IT/Sec divisions is a golden opportunity for the bad guys (hackers, spies, you name it). Long-term security risks are a tremendous thread and will hunt us for months, if not years. And the cavalry won’t come any time soon to rescue us. The IT/Sec teams are overstretched and overwhelmed trying to find balance between supporting daily operations in remote mode and patching up vulnerabilities.

The impact win’t be immediately visible. Smart hackers are just searching for their ways in to our networks and infrastructure, not necessarily looking for instant benefits. They will search for valuable informations, access points and wait for the best time to use them.

By the end of the year I expect a huge surge in data thefts ….