Working from home has become as common in the logistics industry as it has in almost any other part of the industrial market. While you can’t expect delivery personnel or dispatchers to work exclusively from their own houses, the large number of people employed as support staff are increasingly encouraged to do so. It helps to improve productivity by making employees more relaxed.
Unfortunately, it can also increase the risk of cyberattacks since people don’t have to follow any specific rules when they use their own tech. In a physical business environment, information services personnel can individually check every single device as they come across them. This isn’t true when workers never enter an office. The best way to keep everyone safe is to increase situational awareness as much as possible. Here is a guide for how logistics employees can have cybersecurity when working remotely.
Teaching Awareness to Staffers
Corporate managers may want to take a closer look at what logistics standards organizations have to say on this issue because there are actually minimum requirements that all businesses in this space have to follow. Pay close attention to these as you develop a sort of miniature curriculum to share with your staffers. Distributed workers are at risk for spreading potential attack vectors since they’re always in contact with one another in spite of the fact that they might not physically ever meet.
Staffers need to learn all of the basics of staying safe online, and they should use some kind of safety program. While you don’t want to make it look like you’re associated with any of the major cybersecurity vendors, you might be able to make a few friendly suggestions. In an ideal environment, everyone would be using completely open-source secure implementations of every piece of system software, but it’s not realistic to think that’s going to happen in your organization. You can, however, guide people toward using certain specific solutions.
Keeping Files Safe in the Cloud
A majority of remote workers use some kind of cloud-based office software to collaborate with their fellow staffers. There’s a perception that such programs are inherently safe. Commercial software can still carry infections, and it’s possible for bad actors to intercept a link that points to an otherwise legitimate business resource your staffers stored in the cloud. Check to be certain that every single document that gets shared has all of the right permissions associated with it. You don’t want to allow people any greater permissions than they absolutely need to accomplish a particular task.
For instance, there’s no reason why someone should be able to write to a file that only contains instructions. If they only ever need to read a particular file, then it’s best to make it read-only for the majority of users. Keep the administrator password secure and only allow yourself or the system administrator to ever log into online storage directories with full root access.
While this might seem to be a bit inconvenient, especially if you’re used to sharing information with everyone in the office, it’s important to do when posting documents on the web.
