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Unexpected Side Effects: How COVID-19 Affected our Click Habits

Reading Time: ~ 4 min.

Phishing has been around for ages and continues to be one of the most common threats that businesses and home users face today. But it’s not like we haven’t all been hearing about the dangers of phishing for years. So why do people still click?

That’s what we wanted to find out when we conducted our most recent survey. We checked in with thousands of office workers across seven different countries to get a global perspective on phishing and people’s individual click habits. Then we partnered with Dr. Prashanth Rajivan, assistant professor at the University of Washington, to gain a deeper understanding of phishing and those habits, as well as how things have shifted during COVID-19 in our new report: COVID-19 Clicks: How Phishing Capitalized on a Global Crisis.

In this blog post, we’ve summarized this comprehensive report and included tips for how to stay safe, but we strongly encourage you to check out the full writeup.

Why do people still click?

3 in 10 people worldwide clicked a phishing link in the past year. Among Americans, it’s 1 in 3.

According to Dr. Rajivan, what we need to consider is that human beings aren’t necessarily good at dealing with uncertainty, which is part of why cybercriminals capitalize on upheaval (such as a global pandemic) to launch attacks.

“People aren’t great at handling uncertainty. Even those of us who know we shouldn’t click on emails from unknown senders may feel uncertain and click anyway. That’s because we’ve likely all clicked these kinds of emails in the past and gotten a positive reward. The probability of long-term risk vs. short-term reward, coupled with uncertainty, is a recipe for poor decision-making, or, in this case, clicking what you shouldn’t.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

Tip # 1

  • For businesses: Ensure workers have clear distinctions between work and personal time, devices, and obligations. This helps reduce the amount of uncertainty that can ultimately lead to phishing-related breaches.
  • For individuals: Hackers often exploit security holes in older software versions and operating systems. Update software and systems regularly to help shut the door on malware.

Has phishing increased since COVID-19 began

At least one in five people have received a phishing email related to COVID-19.

There’s no doubt that the global COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot about how we live and work. According to our survey, 54% of workers spend more time working from home than they did before the pandemic. With more people connecting to the internet outside of corporate networks and away from the watchful eyes of IT teams, it’s to be expected that cybercriminals would take advantage.

“[We’ve seen] massive spikes […] in phishing URLs targeting COVID-related topics. For example, with more people spending time at home, use of streaming services has gone up. In March alone, we saw a 3000% increase in phishing URLs with ‘youtube’ in the name.

– Grayson Milbourne, security intelligence director, Carbonite + Webroot, OpenText Companies

Regardless, the majority of people surveyed still think they are at least the same level of prepared or more prepared to spot phishing email attempts, now that they’ve spent more time working from home

“People are taking increased physical safety measures in the pandemic, including mask wearing, social distancing, more frequent hand-washing, etc. I think this heightened level of precaution and awareness could cause people to slightly overestimate their overall safety, including their safety regarding online threats.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

Tip #2

  • For businesses: Know your risk factors and over prepare. Once you’ve assessed the risks, you can create a stronger data breach response plan.
  • For individuals: Stay on your toes. By being vigilant and maintaining a healthy dose of suspicion about all links and attachments in messages, you can significantly decrease your phishing risk.

People say they know better. Do they really?

81% of people say they take steps to determine if an email message is malicious. Yet 76% open emails and click links from unknown senders.

When we asked Dr. Rajivan why these numbers don’t line up, he said the difference is between knowing what you should do and actually doing it

“There are huge differences between knowing what to do and actually operationalizing that knowledge in appropriate scenarios. I suspect many people don’t really take the actions they reported, at least not on a regular basis, when they receive suspicious emails.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

Tip #3

  • For businesses: Back up data and ensure employees can access and retrieve data no matter where they are. Accidents happen; what matters most is being able to recover quickly and effectively. Don’t forget to back up collaboration tools too, such as Microsoft® Teams and the Microsoft® 365 suite.
  • For individuals: Make sure important data and files are backed up to secure cloud storage or an external hard drive. In the case of a hard drive, make sure it’s only connected while backing up, so you don’t risk backing up infected or encrypted files. If it’s a cloud back up, use the kind that lets you to restore to a specific file version or point in time.

What’s the way forward?

All over the world, workers say that in order to be better prepared to handle cyberattacks, they need more education.

According to global respondents, more knowledge and better understanding is key for stronger cyber resilience. The top three things people everywhere said would help them better prepare themselves to handle cyber threats like phishing were: knowing which tools could help prevent an attack, knowing what to do if you fall victim to an attack, and understanding the most common types of attacks.

Dr. Rajivan points out that, if businesses are asking individuals to make changes to their own behavior for the greater safety of all, then they need to make it clear they are willing to invest in their people.

“By creating a feeling of personal investment in the individuals who make up a company, you encourage the employees to return that feeling of investment toward their workplace. That’s a huge part of ensuring that cybersecurity is part of the culture. Additionally, if we want to enable employees to assess risk properly, we need to cut down on uncertainty and blurring of context lines. That means both educating employees and ensuring we take steps to minimize the ways in which work and personal life get intertwined.”

– Prashanth Rajivan, Ph.D.

Tip #4

  • For businesses: Invest in your people. Empower your people with regular training to help them successfully avoid scams and exercise appropriate caution online.
  • For individuals: Educate yourself. Even if your company provides training, Dr. Rajivan recommends we all subscribe to cybersecurity-related content in the form of podcasts, social media, blogs, and reputable information sources to help keep strong, cyber resilient behavior top-of-mind.

Want more details on click habits and shifting risks during COVID-19?
Read our full report, COVID-19 Clicks: How Phishing Capitalized on a Global Crisis, to start building out your cybersecurity education today. And be sure to check back here on the Webroot blog for the latest in news in phishing prevention.          

The post Unexpected Side Effects: How COVID-19 Affected our Click Habits appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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The Future of Work: Being Successful in the COVID Era and Beyond

Reading Time: ~ 3 min.

Working from home is no longer something some of us can get away with some of the time. It’s become essential for our health and safety. So, what does the future of work look like in a post-COVID world?

We asked some of our cybersecurity and tech experts for their insights, which we’ll be presenting in a series entitled The Future of Work. In this installment, we’ll cover the qualities that will separate companies able to make smooth transitions to new ways of working from those that can’t. Plus, we’ll examine the effects the pandemic and our response to it have on workplace culture.

What are hallmarks of organizations that will successfully navigate our new workplace realities?

The COVID-19 crisis has forced employers to more fully consider the broader humanity of their employees. With parents becoming teachers and caretakers for ill, often elderly loved ones, greater levels of empathy are required of management. Now, with a lagging world economy and even experts unsure of what shape the current recession will take, financial stress will likely be added to the long list of anxieties facing the modern workforce.

As remote work continues to be a norm in industries like tech, boundaries between home and work life will continue to be murky. This, says Webroot product marketing manager George Anderson, presents opportunities for effective leaders to stand out from their peers.

“Leadership matters now more than ever,” says Anderson, “and being truthful matters even more. Your staff is worried, and platitudes won’t help. They need real communication based on real facts explaining why a company is making certain decisions. Being empathetic, sharing in employee concerns, involving and demonstrating how you value your staff—whether at executive or managerial level—will impact loyalty, dedication, and future business performance.”

Forbes notes that a more empathetic work culture is a silver lining arising from the pandemic that won’t be easily undone. We now know not just our coworkers’ personalities, but also their home office setups, their pets, children, and even their bookshelves. That fuller understanding of the person behind the position will hopefully lead to an enduring human-centric shift in the workplace. 

Long-term, how will office culture change? What policies should change once everyone is physically back at work?

Relatedly, office cultures are likely to change in irreversible ways. Even as we return to physical offices, large events like company all-hands meetings may be attended virtually from personal workspaces, and large team lunches may become rarities. Companies may even choose to alternate days in and out of the office to keep the overall office population lower.

“People will become more comfortable with video calling, screen sharing, and online collaboration,” predicts Anderson, “even between colleagues present in the same office. Boundaries will become blurred and we will find new ways to stay in touch and maintain our human connections by leveraging advanced collaboration solutions in new but secure ways.”

Personal hygiene will also undoubtedly become a bigger aspect of physical office culture. In its guidelines for safely returning to work, the CDC recommends installing a workplace coordinator charged with implementing hygiene best practices office wide. Suggested measures include increasing the number of hand sanitizing stations available to workers, relaxing sick leave policies to discourage ill workers from coming to the office, modernizing ventilation systems, and even daily temperature checks upon entering the building.

“Some of these hygiene measures will be single events, not the future of office work,” notes Anderson. “Others will have more long-term impacts on the way we work together.”

Given the visible impact some measures will have around the office, it will be impossible for them to not affect culture. Because routines like temperature checks may be considered intrusive, it’s important the reasoning behind them be communicated clearly and often. Stressing a culture of cleanliness as a means of keeping all workers healthy and safe can enforce a common bond.

Cybersecurity remains imperative

Cyber resilience isn’t the only aspect of overall business resilience being tested by COVID-19, but it’s a significant one. The cyber threats facing today’s remote workforces differ in key ways from those faced in the past, so its important companies reevaluate their cyber defense strategies. To do our part to help, we’re extending free trials on select business products to 60 days for a limited time. Visit our free trials page or contact us for more information.

The post The Future of Work: Being Successful in the COVID Era and Beyond appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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World Backup Day: A Seriously Good Idea

Reading Time: ~ 3 min.

“Cold Cuts Day,” “National Anthem Day,” “What if Cats and Dogs had Opposable Thumbs Day”…

If you’ve never heard of World Backup Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s another of the gimmicky “holidays” that seem to be snatching up more and more space on the calendar.

(Did you know that single quirky duo, Ruth and Tom Roy, are responsible for copyrighting more than 80 of these holidays, including Bathtub Party Day, held annually on December 5?)

Not so, though, for World Backup Day. While, according to WorldBackUpDay.com, it was founded by a few “concerned users” on the social media site reddit, the day’s dedication is a decidedly serious one.

March 31 was established as “a day for people to learn about the increasing role of data in our lives and the importance of regular backups.”

Each April Fool’s-eve, the site invites humans all over the planet to not be fools and to back up their data. In celebration of World Backup Day, we sat down with Webroot Product Marketing Director George Anderson to see how users can ensure they stay cyber resilient by adhering to good data backup practices.

For World Backup Day, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give to a small or medium-sized business? An everyday computer user, like a parent?

Losing data used to be something that happened because a hard disk failed, a device was lost or stolen, or some other unforeseen accident made a device unusable. These remain risks. But these days, it’s just as likely your data is being held for a ransom or some nasty infection has destroyed it for good.

Up-to-date backups are essential. Remember: it’s not if something will happen to your data, but when. So, prepare for the unexpected. Easily restored data backups let you be more resilient against cyber-attacks and better able to recover customer data, financial information, business-critical files, and precious memories. Anything irreplaceable should be regularly backed up without a second thought, or worse, a passive “it won’t happen to me.”

Thankfully, many of today’s backup solutions are easy-to-use and affordable. My advice is to not become the next data loss or ransomware victim. Simply invest a little into backup software and rest easy knowing you’re covered.

Why is it important that World Backup Day be celebrated year-round? How can we keep the spotlight on backup and cyber resilience?

For those with backup technology in place, World Backup Day should be a reminder of the importance digital information plays in our daily lives, and to check up on existing backups to make sure they are being properly made and that they can be easily restored.

Unfortunately, “set-and-forget” technologies like automated backup and recovery solutions are rarely revisited – until we need them to be 100 percent. So, checking regularly that they’re correctly configured and working properly is important.

For those not currently backing up their data regularly, the day should bring into focus a glaring hole in your home or business data security. Perhaps take the time to consider the impact losing your data forever would have? Then take action.

Back up is no longer a “nice-to-have” capability. In a world where our lives are increasingly digital and our data is threated at lots of different angles, backup is crucial aspect of data security.

What’s the difference between backup and cyber resilience? Should companies be putting more of an emphasis on cyber resilience?

Backup is a key component of cyber resilience, though it’s not the only one. But it does make what could be an existential event, like a total loss of business or personal data, a setback that can be recovered from.

Cyber resilience is first and foremost about detecting, protecting and preventing attacks on your data in the first place. But then, even if your attack detection, protection and prevention defenses fail, your backup and recovery solutions ensure your data isn’t lost for good.

Cyber resilience is not a choice between security and backing up your data. It’s about covering both bases, so if a serious data compromise does occur, recovery is quick and painless to the business

This World Backup Day, take the pledge:

“I solemnly swear to back up my important data and precious memories on March 31st.”

And don’t forget to make sure that both cybersecurity and backup and recovery solutions are in place for your business or home office.

The post World Backup Day: A Seriously Good Idea appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Simplified Two-factor Authentication for Webroot

Reading Time: ~ 1 min.

Webroot has evolved its secure login offering from a secondary security code to a full two-factor authentication (2FA) solution for both business and home users.

Webroot’s 2FA has expanded in two areas. We have:

  • Implemented a time-based, one-time password (TOTP) solution that generates a passcode which is active for only a short period of time.
  • Given our users the option to either opt-in or opt-out, especially those that leverage Webroot for home and personal use.

Starting in December, with the new updates, users will find it easier to use industry-vetted options, including Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, LastPass Authenticator, and Authy 2-Factor Authentication.

Why Two-Factor Authentication?

First and foremost, we encourage all users to opt-in to maintain a higher level of security. Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to your basic login procedure. When logging into an account, the password is a single factor of authentication, and requiring a second factor to prove you are who you say you are adds a layer of security. Each layer of security you add exponentially increases protection from unauthorized access and makes it harder for brute force and credential stuffing attacks to occur.

A Note to Businesses

Users will have the option to opt-in or opt-out of the new Webroot 2FA feature. The Admins tab within our console will show you which of your users have or have not enabled 2FA.

To learn how to enable two-factor authentication, visit the Webroot Community.

The post Simplified Two-factor Authentication for Webroot appeared first on Webroot Blog.

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Cookies, Pixels, and Other Ways Advertisers are Tracking You Online

Reading Time: ~ 3 min.

In May of 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in the EU. Seemingly overnight, websites everywhere started throwing pop-ups to inform us about their use of cookies and our privacy rights. While the presence of the pop-ups may be reassuring to some (and annoying to others), the real issue is that very few of these pop-ups give any explanation as to how the cookies are used or whether they inform marketing decisions. So, before you click “accept” on that next privacy policy notification, read our primer on all things related to cookies, pixels, and web traffic trackers.

Check out the Webroot Community for more tips on how you can manage these cookies.

What is a Cookie?

Cookies (aka. HTTP cookies, session cookies, browser cookies, web cookies, or tracking cookies) are used by almost all websites to keep track of site users’ sessions. While you might not like the idea that a website is tracking you, cookies actually provide a very convenient function. Without them, websites you regularly visit wouldn’t be able to remember you or what content they should serve you. For example, if you added items to an online shopping cart and then navigated away without purchasing, that cart would be lost. You’d have to go back and add everything all over again when you were finally ready to buy. If it weren’t for cookies, our web experiences would be entirely different (and much more frustrating).

In cases like the previous example, the use of tracking cookies is pretty benign and helps smooth the user’s online experience overall. So, if cookies can provide a beneficial service, why do we need privacy laws like GDPR? The answer is because of a specific type of cookie, i.e. third-party tracking cookies. These are created by domains other than the one you are actively visiting. They run silently in the background, tracking you and your online habits without your notice and compiling long-term records of your browsing behavior. These are typically used by advertisers to serve ads “relevant” to the user even as they navigate unrelated parts of the web.

Who Serves Cookies and Why?

By far the most prolific servers of third-party cookies are Google and Facebook. To help businesses target and track advertisements, both Google and Facebook both suggest embedding a tracking pixel—which is just a short line of code—into business websites. These pixels then serve up cookies, which allow the site owner to track individual user and session information.

The tracking doesn’t stop there. To optimize their marketing tools for all users, Google and Facebook both track and store this data in their own databases for processing through their own algorithms. Even if you’re not currently logged in to Facebook, your session data can still be tracked by your IP address.

What is People-Based Targeting?

Google and Facebook’s ad platforms work incredibly well because they pair cookie data with an existing bank of user data that most of us have willingly (or unwillingly) given them. Your Facebook account, Instagram account, Gmail, and Google Chrome accounts are all linked to larger systems that inform sophisticated advertising networks how to appeal to you, specifically, as a consumer. This way, websites can serve you ad content you’re likely to click on, no matter which sites you’re actively visiting. Combining traditional cookie tracking with these types of in-depth user profiles is called “people-based targeting” and it’s proven to be an incredibly powerful marketing tactic.

How to Protect Your Data

The sad truth is that you’ll never fully escape tracking cookies, and, frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to. As mentioned above, they streamline your online experiences in a pretty significant way. What you can do is reduce the breadth of their reach in your digital life. Here are a few key ways to do that.

  1. Stay vigilant. Be sure to read the privacy policies before you accept them. This advice goes beyond the GDPR-compliant pop-ups that have become so prevalent in the last year. Keep in mind that tech giants are often interconnected, so it’s important to be aware of all the privacy policies you’re being asked to accept.
  2. Clean house. You don’t have to do it often, but clear your cookie cache every once in a while. There are plusses and minuses here; clearing your cache will wipe away any long-term tracking cookies, but it will also wipe out your saved login information. But don’t let that deter you! Despite that sounding like a hassle, you may find your browser performance improves. Exact steps for how to clear your cookies will depend on your browser, but you’ll find plenty of guides online. Don’t forget to clear the cache on your mobile phone as well.
  3. Use a VPN. Most of all, we recommend installing a virtual private network (VPN) on all of your devices. VPNs wrap your web traffic in a tunnel of encryption, which will prevent tracking cookies from following you around the web. Make sure you use a reputable VPN from a trusted source, such as Webroot® WiFi Security. A number of the supposedly free VPN options may just sell your data to the highest bidder themselves.

Cookie tracking and digital ad delivery are growing more sophisticated every day. Check back here for the latest on how these technologies are evolving, and how you can prepare yourself and your family to stay ahead.

The post Cookies, Pixels, and Other Ways Advertisers are Tracking You Online appeared first on Webroot Blog.