This article tackles the idea that the coronavirus pandemic has significantly increased the number of people getting hacked (“more than doubled”), and that people’s personal laptops are now being used for more than just personal tasks – they are also being used to handle confidential data or other work-related material that should require higher security but cannot due to the working-at-home culture that COVID has brought. Normally, in-person offices would have a dedicated setup and a very secure network, but these are not things most people can afford to have at home.
To advise people who are staying at home, Morrison, the author, recommends a few tools like using different passwords, getting a VPN, and utilizing two-factor authentication. This also brings up the idea that day-to-day users of technology sacrifice aspects of cybersecurity in order to benefit our own comfort and experience. It is easy in the moment to deny using two-factor authentication because the threat is not tangible or does not feel real to many people, but it does leave users open to attacks, more so in this COVID era, as Morrison argues.
