Research conducted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic shows an increase in cyber threats as cybercriminals try to take advantage of users working remotely. What most users may not realize is that they could be making it easier for threat actors to target them.
Here’s how: Every time a user posts a picture of his or her remote office setup on social media or participates in a videoconference, the user unwittingly may be revealing personal or company information that threat actors can exploit. In an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal, a cybersecurity expert warned about the dangers of over-sharing.
“People often don’t realize how much personal information they are revealing in photos—images of their houses and hobbies that provide clues about their usernames, passwords and other personal information. And hashtags like #WorkFromHome and #HomeOffice make it convenient for crooks to zero in on photos that contain those details,” wrote Jason R.C. Nurse, a cybersecurity at the University of Kent’s School of Computing in the U.K.
Nurse notes that so far, no cybercrimes have been documented as a result of sharing photos during the pandemic, but the potential is there. There is no doubt, however, that threat actors have upped their game, as evidenced by separate studies that (ISC)2 and ISACA have conducted.
In the ISACA study, 87% of respondents believe the rush to set up remote workstations to cope with the pandemic has increased data protection and privacy risks. The
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