Working from home leads to sloppy security practices - survey
The survey, which was taken in October and includes responses from 2,000 remote office workers in the United States, UK, France and Germany.
By ZEV STUBSome of 208 monday.com employees participate in a Zoom video conference this week(photo credit: Courtesy)
While 95% of employees say they would like to continue working from home even after the pandemic is over, many follow poor security practices that could pose problems for businesses, a survey by Israel cybersecurity company CyberArk found.Connecting to corporate systems and resources was the biggest hurdle of working from home, 78% of the respondents said. That led 67% of them to admit they had found a way around corporate security policies to be more productive, including sending work documents to personal email addresses, sharing passwords and installing rogue applications, the survey found. They did that even though 54% said they had received guidelines from their workplace regarding security issues.Furthermore, 67% said they had used corporate devices for personal use, and 57% said they had allowed other members of their household to use their corporate devices for activities such as schoolwork, gaming and shopping.In addition, 82% of all remote workers admitted to reusing passwords, a 12% increase since the spring, according to CyberArk, a Nasdaq-traded company based in Petah Tikva.The survey, taken in October and including responses from 2,000 remote office workers in the US, UK, France and Germany, also noted a number of challenges remote workers face as they seek to balance their work and personal lives.Some 45% of remote employees cited disruption from family members and pets as the biggest challenge of remote work, followed by balancing work and personal life (43%) and “Zoom fatigue” (34%).But employees also recognized many benefits of remote work, including saving time on commuting (32%), being able to run errands (24%) and catch up on household chores between meetings (23%).“The global pandemic has been the largest test yet for the future of distributed work,” CyberArk chief operating officer Matt Cohen said. “Working people have proven incredibly resilient as they rise to the challenge and overcome the stress and significant obstacles of blending home and work lives. As we continue to adapt to this new way of operating, it’s the responsibility of both employees and organizations to take responsibility for corporate security.”
