How the Coronavirus can Affect Companies that Do Not Have Backups or Disaster Recovery Plans?

The coronavirus outbreak has rocked the world, with more than 90,000 cases of infection and over 3,000 deaths. The aftermath of the disease is slowly seeping through all sectors of the industry. Companies handling digital data on a regular basis are not exempt from the effects of the coronavirus outbreak either. Malicious cybercriminals are trying their best to misuse the ongoing coronavirus scare to their advantage. Their actions can lead to data loss as well as misuse. In this situation, it is important that companies maintain a backup of all their data and come up with disaster mitigation and recovery plan.

Here are some of the ways in which the coronavirus outbreak can affect companies that do not have backups or disaster management plans in place:

Phishing emails

Hackers and other cybercriminals are sending out phishing emails as baits to get personal and sensitive information from scared users. Fake documents dressed as health hazard information alerts have been circulating over the internet through these emails. Some even impersonate the CDC, trying to get people to click on them on the pretext of informing them of recent cases of coronavirus infection in their area. If the links in these emails are clicked, or if the attachments are downloaded, cybercriminals may attempt to steal your credentials or install malware, spyware, and ransomware. It is therefore important that companies perform complete backups of their data and develop a disaster management plan to protect themselves.

Insecure remote connections

If employees are restricting all business-related travel to protect themselves from contracting the disease, companies have another problem at hand. This is because these employees would then be working remotely from home using a network that is very likely not protected. Even if it is secured, it may not be to the extent that a company handling its customers’ private and sensitive data would want. This could lead to loss, leakage, and misuse of customer data. To avoid these hazards, companies must have backups of their data.

Travel restriction on employees

Hundreds of millions of people are being contained within China to prevent the coronavirus outbreak from spreading any further. Similar quarantining procedures are being carried out in all countries where positive cases have been detected. If a company’s

employees who traveled to a different country for business have unfortunately been

trapped and are required to be quarantined, the company must have access to the data that they were handling prior to their travel. If it does not have access and its employees are unavailable in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the company’s business operations can become severely affected. Therefore, companies must create backups for all their data handled by different employees.

Conclusion

The emergence of new kinds of unprecedented information security threats due to the coronavirus outbreak has made it even more important to establish proper backup and recovery plans as part of the information security measures in all companies handling data.