Importance of Multi-factor Authentication during remote work

We all know how the corona virus has impacted our life - economically, personally, and professionally. The virus has forced us to change the way we live and work. Most of us moved back to our native place, and almost all of us are working from home. We are now far away from the safe and secured office space. This stirs up the need for a better and safe way of accessing our company’s data and services.

Experts point out that the proportion of cyber attacks on people working remotely has increased exponentially between April and August. These attacks are targeted towards businessmen and employees of big organizations so that they can extort a hefty ransom. Attackers are exploiting the chaos caused by COVID-19, which shifted major portions of IT related works to the employees’ home. It is imperative that we all must enforce an extra layer of security for our home networks and all of our online accounts.

How to prevent such security incidents

The first step that everyone must do is to check whether the anti-virus software installed on our computer is up-to-date. We should keep ourselves away from visiting websites that are not protected by https and avoid downloading files from such unsecured websites. Security experts point out that attackers are increasingly employing social engineering tactics to lure innocent employees of large organizations. Recently Twitter employees suffered such an attack from hackers causing fake tweets being tweeted from many official Twitter accounts.

What are all the major causes of security breaches?

Apart from using a less secured network and outdated anti-virus software, there is one major factor that results in many security breaches - weak passwords. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), nearly 80% of security breaches are tied to passwords. Accounts that are protected by passwords alone have very high chances of getting breached, and that’s why most organizations have mandated their users to use additional layers of verification besides passwords.

How Zoho is tackling these cyber threats

In Zoho, we have an organization policy that mandates multi-factor authentication for our employees via OneAuth, an in-house authenticator application for their organization account. For our users, passwords will be cross-checked with the publicly available breached passwords list during sign-up, to prevent them from using an exposed password that might put their account at risk. Also, we constantly remind our users to enable MFA to improve their account security. Download OneAuth to secure your Zoho account via multi-factor authentication and prevent any security breaches in future.

(Zoho has never faced any security-related issues, and the data you have stored with us is completely safe. We also do not sell your data to anyone.)

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