On Tuesday, Sophie Gould, our Head of Learning & Development at F-LEX, chaired another fantastic COVID-19 virtual session for GCs and Senior in-house lawyers in collaboration with LexisNexis UK and Radius Law.

What General Counsel are telling F-LEX

In this week's ice breaker poll our attendees decided that they were looking forward to seeing friends and family most. 

In other polls, 55% voted that their company will not be likely to make redundancies following furlough leave and 52% of attendees said that their company will continue allowing those who can work from home to continue doing so, as we come out of lockdown.

Working from home cybersecurity risks

This week we heard from Matthew Redding GC at Six Degrees, on cybersecurity and the increased risks as a result of so many of us working from home. Matthew reminded attendees that cybersecurity is about continuous awareness and reaction to a changing set of circumstances. Within business this means taking a range of technical steps – but also most relevantly for the legal community, ensuring that the human part of the equation is cyber security aware, meaning a focus on: training, operations, processes and policies, and ensuring that they are implemented and followed in the changing environment.

Top tips for keeping your company safe:

1. Arrange for a cyber security maturity assessment for the remote working environment, and be prepared to update it for a hybrid environment. 

2. Ensure phishing training is updated and reminders of recent threats are sent out, the typical mechanism for spotting them is being overcome by more sophisticated malicious actors who mask website identities and have worked out how to avoid typos.

3. Check your insurance coverage for cyber breach coverage - is it covered, is it broad enough for business needs, and ensure that the number to call in an incident is logged correctly in any crisis response planning packs.

4. Prepare for ‘unlockdown’ - check that someone’s thinking about return to office and the threat of machines that have been off the corporate network for a while when they return (what we are referring to as our car wash programme), and again – how cybersecurity assessment, policies and approaches might need to be updated again for a hybrid environment.

Useful resources from Six Degrees:

• Cyber Intelligence Reports – https://www.6dg.co.uk/coronavirus

• Remote Device Security guide (relevant to core recommendation 4) – https://www.6dg.co.uk/how-to-guide/remote-device-security/

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