Today's issue includes events affecting Australia, Brazil, Canada, European Union, France, Mexico, Russia, Slovakia, United Kingdom, and United States.

Bring your own context.

Spare a thought for a help desk under pressure. It's not easy to cope with a surge in telework. How should you prepare? Or if you're in the midst of things, how should you adapt?

"Normally, this is something that you'd have months or even a year to plan out and go on, you know, and get implemented. You've had to do this in a week. There are going to be mistakes. There are going to be holes. There are going to be problems that people run through. And that is going to create other problems. 

"So, you know, you'll obviously have support problems because you'll have an overwhelmed support staff that is suddenly fielding, ten, twenty times more calls than they normally do. You'll also have employees that have trouble getting things set up, and so they may try to do workarounds, which means you could expose sensitive data. So there's all kinds of potential problems there. 

"And then, as with the COVID-19 example, because of all the confusion and uncertainty, the employees may actually be more likely to click on a phishing email, especially one that purports to be from your IT team, because right now, you're probably expecting a lot of communication from your IT team. And so you get an email that says, VPN instructions - open this Word document. So you open it, and turns out you've installed something malicious on your desktop that now connects in. 

"The best thing that you can do to sort of answer your original question is have a very well-documented plan that's communicated as early as possible, and then have backup plans if those don't work. So in other words, send out to your newly minted workforce, here are the steps you need to do to get connected. Only follow advice that comes from this specific email address. Don't ignore anything that is, companyname-support@gmail.com or anything like that. So warn people that these may be coming. 

"So you do need to be adaptable in security and IT right now. Understand the real-world problems that people are having and give them the tools they need to do their job and feel confident that they're doing it in a secure way."

—Allan Liska, senior analyst at threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, on the CyberWire Daily Podcast, 3.24.20.

Planning and rehearsal always are best, but in a crisis intelligent improvisation can still work wonders.

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