Nearly 40 Percent of UK Businesses Laid Off Staff Due to Security Policy Breaches Since Work-from-Home Shift

The sudden shift to remote work has revealed new risks that threaten the stability and integrity of company infrastructure. From the beginning of the pandemic, it was clear that the new remote workforce faltered in maintaining good cyber hygiene and security policies.

As a result, 39 percent of UK businesses admitted to having fired staff members for a breach of company-wide security protocols and guidelines since the outbreak began, according to a new study from Centrify.

The findings are a result of a survey of 200 UK business decision makers who laid out how their corporate cybersecurity has been impacted by a newly established remote workforce.

65 percent of respondents said they made significant changes to their cybersecurity policies in response to the coronavirus outbreak and 100% remote workforce. Despite these substantial adjustments, 58 percent say employees are more inclined to bypass corporate security protocols when shifting to a home environment, “indicating a fundamental flaw in the execution of security measures in a remote-working model.”

In an attempt to prevent weak security practices from workers, 57% of respondents disclosed that they are currently striving to enforce additional security measure to authenticate employees, including fingerprint, facial recognition technology and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for accessing sensitive applications, files and accounts.

Additionally, 55 percent of businesses have banned, or plan to ban, employees from using personal devices such as laptops and smartphones when working from home.

This decision can also be reinforced by the fact that visits to high-risk apps and sites have increased during work-from-home by 161 percent, and that around 18 percent of employees are known to share their work device with a member of their household.