Enterprises have have to scale up their security thanks to the amount of remote work going on during the COVID-19 pandemic, but some are more prepared than others to meet the challenge.

To help prevent security breaches, IBM X-Force is working with enterprises to find out if their data security is truly ready or not.

“The attack surface has really increased from an attacker perspective,” said Wendi Whitmore (pictured), vice president of IBM X-Force threat intelligence at IBM. “Since March 1, we’ve already seen a 6,000% increase in coronavirus-related spam. So you’ve now got this larger attack surface that organizations need to protect against, and you’ve got an increase in threats and threat activity that is attacking them.”

Whitmore spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed security breaches and how enterprises can make sure they’re ready. (* Disclosure below.)

Testing security during expanded remote work

The current remote work culture, with its wide-ranging attack surface, is giving many chief information officers a lot of extra work these day, as most are accustomed to defending an on-site work environment. And most organizations haven’t even tested out their remote-work security measures even if they actually have them, according to Whitmore.

“One of the things that’s super-critical in these types of situations is to have an incident response plan and to make sure that you’re testing it,” Whitmore said. “It’s really as simple as putting words on paper, understanding how you’re going to get a hold of your critical team members, having a backup plan in place for communication strategies if your primary infrastructure goes offline.”

If a company is more mature in their security plans, then they need to have a variety of scenarios that they’re testing against, according to Whitmore. A great one to practice right now would be a company’s response to a ransomware attack.

“What do you do when you get the initial notification? Do you have critical and sensitive data that’s backed up offline and not always connected to the network?” Whitmore asked. “If so, you’re going to be in a much better spot to effectively defend against those attacks and limit any of the negative impact to them.”

IBM X-Force helps customers investigate data breaches, and they have a team of threat intelligence analysts and researchers and a team that does data breach simulations in a very immersive environment — which they are bringing virtual right now. IBM X-Force can simulate an entire breach for its clients, which includes everything from the initial attack, data analytics, media training and legal counsel.

“It’s really a comprehensive immersive environment that simulates … the heart pounding that occurs when you actually respond to a data breach,” Whitmore said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE