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Cyber Best Practices for Remote Work

In response to the pandemic, many CPA firms established or updated their policies and security protocols to address remote work by employees, given the security challenges not present in traditional office environments. As more firms opt to offer staff permanent remote work arrangements, firms should revisit their written policies and security protocols to assess their specific threats, risks, and vulnerabilities to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place to address the new paradigm,

When evaluating the propriety of a firm's policies and security protocols, first assume that threats will occur. This can be a difficult pill to swallow, especially for firms that do a good job of securing their on-premises infrastructure, However, potential vulnerabilities exist within the infrastructure and applications that employees use to work remotely,

Although not meant to be all-inclusive, the following basic best practice measures for firms continue to be extremely critical:

* Ensure all software has the latest security options/patches to help protect against malware, viruses, and hacker attacks.

* Frequently back up all important data and information and verify your backups to reduce the likelihood that critical data is lost in the event of a cyberattack. Protect the backups in all remote and external locations, outside of your network, where they are safe from ransomware that targets backup copies. Periodically verify that your data backup process is working properly to assure that your data will be recoverable.

* Require employees to change and strengthen passwords frequently. Systems are only as secure as the passwords used to access them,

* Use multi-factor authentication to add an extra level of security and to help prevent an account hack,

Claim trends show that employees are both the weakest link and the first line of defense against most cybersecurity attacks, Firms should prioritize appropriate firm-wide cybersecurity awareness...