37% of Remote Employees Have No Security Restrictions on Corporate Devices

• More than half of organizations have given employees a corporate device for remote work
• 37% of employees say they are not restricted from activities like visiting unsecured websites, sharing personal information, or downloading unvetted software
• 54% of users would still visit a website after receiving a warning about potential security risks associated with the site

A study commissioned to help IT professionals understand the online behaviors and technology challenges associated with remote work reveals that many remote employees have no security limitations on corporate devices, increasing the risk of a data breach.

Combining a series of surveys among 1,500 employees, ManageEngine researchers found many risky online behaviors that could compromise corporate data and devices.

More than half of respondents say their organization has handed them a corporate device for remote work, yet 37% of those respondents also say there have no restrictions on activities like visiting unsecured websites, sharing personal information, or downloading third-party software that could pose security threats.

Even more worryingly, 54% said they would still visit a website after receiving a warning about potential security risks associated with the site. Of those, 42% were 18-24 years old, and 40% were 25-34 years old, indicating younger employees are more likely to expose the company to a potential security incident.

These results support findings from a similar survey conducted by The Ponemon Institute recently. As organizations struggle to better govern privileged access, researchers found that existing cybersecurity tool stacks yield too many false positives and more data than can be reviewed by IT admins in a timely fashion. 53% of respondents also said their tools don’t provide enough contextual information to combat insider threats – whether from malice or human error.

As more and more organizations rely on a remote workforce, Bitdefender seeks to address insider threats with a holistic approach – an integrated endpoint protection, risk management, and attack forensics platform, enhanced with user behavior risk analytics. Businesses can leverage Bitdefender GravityZone with integrated risk management and analytics to continuously assess, prioritize, and address misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, including human-triggered ones. Learn more here.