The global transition towards remote working has led many people to develop some rather strange new habits, new research has suggested.
A global report from Kaspersky found that many workers are enjoying the freedom of not being in the office and relaxing a number of personal standards whilst at home.
A somewhat shocking 11% even said they were working in the nude, showing an unexpected expansion of the flexibility that remote working was meant to offer.
Bad habits
Elsewhere, the survey found that nearly half (48%) had enjoyed working in comfortable clothes, and that over a third (36%) were taking naps during the day. 27% of workers said they had enjoyed working outside in the garden or on a balcony, and 23% even manage to binge-watch Netflix at work.
However, employees need to ensure that whilst their personal standards may be slipping, their attitudes towards security and online protection remain high. Having a comprehensive and up-to-date security platform on corporate devices is vital to ensuring workers stay safe, no matter where they are located, and that valuable business data doesn’t get stolen.
“This lockdown turned out to be a two-way street for people whose job allows them to work from home,” noted Marina Titova, Head of Consumer Product Marketing at Kaspersky.
“On the one hand, employees finally got a chance to forget about the downsides of big-city life and start working in a more comfortable atmosphere. On the other hand, they faced many challenges when struggling to remain productive, reorganising their workspace and developing new habits. When you work from home your privacy is put at greater risk, making it vital that you remember to take care of your digital security.”
Further recent research from Kaspersky found that attacks on remote desktop protocols (RPD) grew by a staggering 242% compared to last year, with threat actors clearly seeing an opportunity in the mass transition to remote working.
In addition to the huge increase in the number of brute force attacks on RPD, 1.7 million unique malicious files were disguised as apps for corporate communication.