Cybercrime lurks as biggest work-from-home experiment puts state, corporate secrets in peril
- Staff working at home or connected to public Wi-fi networks are more likely to be hacked, security analysts
- Hong Kong weathered first month of working-from-home regime without any noticeable rise in cybercrime, according to privacy commissioner
Go to a coffee shop in Hong Kong and you will see office workers wearing masks to protect themselves from catching the new coronavirus, connecting to public Wi-fi and shuffling through papers downloaded from their office servers.
While that may be a common sight after the biggest shift in work culture ever, the risk from another form of attack has remained constant: cybercrime.
From stock traders to civil servants, more employees are handling confidential information off-site globally under the biggest work-from-home experiment in decades. That poses a risk to governments and businesses which were not fully prepared for the shift on such a scale, security analysts say.
“I’ve seen a lot of individuals over the last few weeks working in coffee shops, using public Wi-fi,” Stuart Witchell, a managing director at risk consultancy firm Berkeley Research Group, said in an interview. “Data is obviously more vulnerable outside the corporate environment.”
More than 60 per cent of companies in major Chinese cities have not reopened offices since the Lunar New Year holiday, allowing employees in the world’s second-largest economy to work remotely from home, according to statistics from Baidu, which operates China’s biggest search engine.