I keep missing this.

Every Tuesday at 1:00 MT! Same time, same great station :) 

Hello, Webroot Community! Hope you’re having a great week so far. 

Thanks to everyone for coming out today.

We’ll get started in a second.

Thanks again for submitting your questions this week. This outpour of questions has been phenomenal to see. Keep it coming!

Here we go! 

How have webroot employees adapted to serving their customers? - Eden

What are you doing to help people getting back to work where possible? - Jason C.

A lot of security related CV19 updates appear to be targeted at individuals not businesses. What is the advice from Webroot to businesses on how to keep their security up to date during the Pandemic? Is there any fundamental differences to what has been put forward before? - Richard C.

Is WFH the new normal ? - Costas T.

How long do you believe covid will affect cyber infrastructure? - Anestis P.

Is there a training specific for covid? - Argiris F.

What has been the biggest challenge for Webroot during Covid-19? - Rick W.

What makes the COVID-19 cyber crimes so much worse than pre-COVID cyber crimes? - Teri M. 

Is WFH the new normal ? - Costas T.

Hi,

On is WFH the new normal? I frankly do not see WFH becoming the new normal because many people’s home accommodation is not suitable for WFH, the social interactions at work are not replaceable by technology, and human beings are social animals and physical teams and face to face conversation are needed. (Many people are already socially isolated by technology we shouldn’t be looking to compound this isolationism.)

However, we will see the option to WFH especially to ‘knowledge’ workers whose tasks do not need a continuous on-site presence being offered more flexible WFH terms. Organizations will close smaller, more expensive offices, and invest in enabling WFH.

How long do you believe covid will affect cyber infrastructure? - Anestis P.

And following up on that and how Covid is affecting cyber infrastructure, I think that Covid has and will permanently affect cyber infrastructure, if by that you mean IT security and Cyber Security will retain the new controls put in place to increase the cyber resilience of users WFH.

Things like 2FA/MFA, vulnerability scanning, extended use of secure and separated networks and other new security additions will likely stay in place even when users return to their offices. It’s hard to go backwards, especially if its making the business more secure. There’s also the factor that users have got used to more barriers to entry an understand their necessity a bit more .  

Is there a training specific for covid? - Argiris F.

And that leads nicely to training for Covid question from Argiris. 

Yes - Webroot realized there has never been such a huge need for cyber-awareness training as now. So, to that end, we have introduced and are updating monthly Covid phishing lures and templates to simulate the Covid phishing threats we’re seeing right now.  

We have also doubled the number of courses available since earlier this year and added new courses like Working From Home; Email Attachment Scams; Business Email Compromise; Two Factor Authentication; Spear Phishing and added a new content supplier to supplement our own activities. 

All with the aim of having the educational pieces our Clients need to fully train their users. Microsoft AD  Azure integration has taken longer than anticipated because of severe delays with Microsoft app approval, but we should see that in the next few days and better auto-enrollment. 

Security Awareness is a major focus for us right now an equipping Clients with the best training possible.

I wouldn’t say any fundamental differences, but the landscape has definitely adapted to the COVID landscape. Most of the phishing lures are COVID themed. Since 60-80% of the workforce is now remote, a lot of those people are using personal devices to do corporate work. This means that they are handling work data that could consist of PII or other confidential data. Make sure to be using VPNs on your personal machines along with reputable mutli-layered security solutions. The average personal device does not have the same security software or group policies to protect it as well as a corporate machine. We’ve also seen 40% increase in unsecured RDP. Businesses set up more devices to be remoted into which is great for a remote workforce, but it has to be done securely. Make sure to use a solution that encrypts the traffic and has 2fa authentication. If you just turn on the built in Windows RDP functionality then defaults are anyone can request a connection and then enter your username and password. Those that think their username and passwords are secure are mistaken as more defaults allow an UNLIMITED number of login attempts so criminals will use brute force tools to crack your credentials. Then once remoted onto the desktop of the machine it's very easy for criminals to move laterally through the network an infect the entire organization. It's also really easy to steal confidential data this way that would allow criminals to ask for a very large ransom or threaten GDPR and CCPA ramifications.  

More info here:

https://www.webroot.com/blog/2020/03/19/staying-cyber-resilient-during-a-pandemic/

What has been the biggest challenge for Webroot during Covid-19? - Rick W.

I like the Webroot challenges question as undoubtedly we have been having a few. I’m glad to say mostly transparent to you our Clients.

Those challenges have been varied. Now being part of OpenText we are having to adopt a lot of new systems integration and migration of our information assets. We were formed into a new SMB/C division so organizing that and getting everyone and everything on the ‘same page’.

We are also just about to launch a new Webroot marketing look and feel and update all our materials.

Also communication with you and other Clients has bee more problematic as we don’t see so many of you at all the events we attend.

Even something major like introducing the first enhanced Script protection part of our new Webroot Evasion Shield and getting you to turn it on (as we shipped it off to stop legitimate ‘home grown’ scripts being mistakenly shut off in Clients environments)  has not been easy to get over to all Clients.  Bottom line it needs to be manually turned on to ‘detect and report’ as a precursor to switching it fully to on ‘report and remediate’. Maybe we should have just shipped it on and take thousands of support calls! There is a good deal of information here on the  Community about Evasion Shield so please look at it. 

There hasn’t been any change in malware heuristics or behavior with infecting a machine, nor are there any special new laws that are being broken with COVID so from a crime standpoint there isn’t really any change. 

However, what is special about malware during COVID is the fear aspect. Everyone is consuming so much media around COVID that its everywhere and inescapable. That’s why most of the top malware campaigns have changed their email lures to be covid themed. There is a higher chance that people will throw out their cyber hygiene and caution with links in emails. It’s simply easier to infect people now than it was pre-COVID. 

I hope this answers your question 

Just a couple more questions to go before we close out today. 

What are you doing to help people getting back to work where possible? - Jason C.

Jason’s question on what are you doing to help people getting back to work where possible? 

If you mean at Webroot, we have adopted a four phase approach and are just entering phase 1 where we let those with individual offices return to work with a whole load of caveats and social distancing and physical changes. It will be a long time before occupancy even gets to 10% for this stage. Like everyone who is well advised we realize this pandemic is still in its first phase and there is a high likelihood there will be a stage 2 as there was in the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak.

With our Customers we are investing in Training, flexible renewals, unlimited trial anything we can do to relate to the issues we know our customers are facing. We are all in this together (sic) and our current and future business depends on us helping our customers as much as we can.

95% of the company adapted to working from home with the transition so seamless that you wouldn’t even know we weren’t in the office! 

For our customers, we have extended our trial times by 60 days. We’ve always modified our renewals to be very flexible allowing for shorter terms. As George has mentioned, we’ve also created new training material around COVID phishing lures and new tactics going around. We’ve also created more open conversations (like this thread) to help anyone with their questions and so we can be as transparent as possible. 

Thanks to everyone for joining us today and to @GeorgeA and @TylerM for helping us answer questions. 

If anyone has any additional questions, be sure to stop by next Tuesday at 1:00 PM MT. or add your questions here and we’ll do our best to answer all of them.

Until next week, stay resilient!