One of the perks of working from home, aside from avoiding the daily traffic, is having the privacy employees don’t get to enjoy in the workplace. This is probably one of the reasons, cybersecurity solutions firm found that 51% of employees working remotely use company-issued devices in watching adult content.

The report also found how employees are feeling the impact of the sudden shift to remote work setup on their work-life balance with nearly a third (31%) of workers said they find themselves working longer hours or with more load than before.

Kaspersky’s report also found that it has become harder for workers to separate working and personal activity, especially when it comes to IT. Aside from the workers who use the devices for personal and corporate use in watching adult content, 18% admit they do this on devices provided to them by their employers, with 33% admitting to watching adult content on their personal devices that they also use to do their work.

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Also, 55% of workers say they are reading more news now than they were before they started working from home. While this is understandable because people will want to stay updated with the latest coronavirus developments, 60% of this activity is done on devices that are used for work. This can potentially lead to malware infections if employees do not pay attention to the resources and websites they visit.

Secure corporate systems

“Organizations cannot just fulfill all user requests, such as allowing staff to use any services as they want to. It is necessary to find a balance on user convenience, business necessity, and security,” said Andrey Evdokimov, Chief Information Security Officer at Kaspersky. “To achieve this, a company should provide access to services based on the principle of only supplying minimal, necessary privileges, implement a VPN, and use secure and approved corporate systems. These types of software may have certain restrictions that slightly reduce usability, but offer greater assurances in providing security measures,”

Workers are also developing a habit of using their personal services for working purposes — increasing the potential risks from shadow IT, including the disclosure of sensitive information. For instance, 42% of employees use personal email accounts for work-related matters, and 49% admit their usage has increased when working from home. 38% use personal messengers that have not been approved by their IT departments, with 60% of them doing it more often in their new circumstances.

To ensure businesses do all they can to keep their employees and corporate data safe, Kaspersky recommends employers follow these measures:

• Schedule basic security awareness training for your employees. This can be done online and cover essential practices, such as account and password management, email security, endpoint security. Kaspersky and Area9 Lyceum have prepared a free module to help staff work safely from home
• Ensure devices, software, applications and services are kept updated with the latest patches
• Install proven protection software, such as Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud, on all endpoints, including mobile devices, and switch on firewalls. Any solution used should include protection from web threats and email phishing

For workers and users at home who have to work from their personal devices, Kaspersky advises:

• Using a reliable security solution, such as Kaspersky Security Cloud, for comprehensive protection from a wide range of threats.
• Only downloading educational and entertaining content strictly from trusted sources