Organizational Cybersecurity Post The Pandemic: An Exploration of Remote Working Risks and Mitigation Strategies Dr. Stephen Treacy, Anoop Sabu, Thomas Bond, Joseph O’Sullivan, Jack Sullivan, Peter Sylvester Department of Business Information Systems Cork University Business School, Ireland Stephen.treacy@ucc.ie Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has forced organisations to embrace the largest remote workforce in history, yet this upheaval also brought an increasing number of cyber vulnerabilities to the fore. Organisations must remain committed to not leaving business processes, personal data, or vital infrastructure at risk, which has proved challenging for most. As remote working establishes itself as the new normal, criminals are seeking to capitalize on the widespread cybersecurity uncertainty, and succeeding. Private organisations and cybersecurity professionals must come together to establish robust solutions for home working cybersecurity. This investigation explores several prevalent cyber risks (private networks, public hotspots, remote desktop protocol, authentication policies, virtual private network configuration and phishing attacks) across three key threat classifications of management, technical and human factors when remote working from the perspective of twenty industry experts. These findings offer key insights to emerging vulnerabilities, while also revealing defined strategies for organisations to help mitigate these challenges. Keywords: Cybersecurity, Remote Working, Covid-19, Threat Classification, Phishing. 1. Introduction As the Covid-19 pandemic struck Wuhan, China in 2019 before subsequently spreading across the world in January 2020, businesses had to quickly adapt, abruptly shifting their employees to remote working. As this new way of doing business suddenly became the norm, organisations quickly realized they were being unprecedently challenged to protect valuable data from employee behaviours being targeted by hackers and social engineers. While safe in the comfort of an organizational setting when it comes to cybersecurity, working from home employees tend to develop security amnesia, often abandoning routine security practices, for example establishing authentication procedures, or forwarding suspicious emails, links or attachments to their IT Department. Though employees might initially plan to report these occurrences, including phone calls from social engineers designed to extract valuable information under the guise of pretending to be clients, customers or employees from other offices, they often do not, continuing instead to absentmindedly open links and attachments, and/or engaging in these phone calls without asking for proper verification (Borkovich and Skovira, 2020). Researchers generally agree that unfortunately it is the well-intentioned yet careless worker, vendor, consultant, or other stakeholder that represents as much of a danger to an organisation’s cybersecurity as faceless actors on the outside. As a result, valuable lessons that have been learned by organizations in the wake of remote working have often been due to employees abandoning routine security practices when working from home. As more people continue to join and engage with these digital platforms as part of their daily life, so too does the number of cyberattacks that are increasing in many countries, opening new playing fields for cybercriminals to target and exploit. Organisations need to take immediate action to mitigate new cybersecurity risks created by this sudden shift to remote working, because otherwise similar gaps in the organisational and employee protection may be exploited. 2. Literature Review The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated organisations’ dependence on information technology, especially the need for adequate cybersecurity to protect the remote workforce and the technologies we are using (Furnell et al., 2021). Cybersecurity can be defined as being the “collection of tools, policies, security concepts, security safeguards, guidelines, risk management approaches, actions, training, best practices, assurance and technologies that can be used to protect the cyber environment and organization and user’s assets” (ITU, 2008). Modern cybersecurity thus involves detecting behavioural anomalies to prioritise the most severe threats, reducing investigation and threat detection times. According to Shi (2020), it is evident that Covid-19 has impacted cybersecurity spending by firms and organisations, outlining that spending has decreased even though 46% of organisations reported an increased amount of cybersecurity threats related to remote working, with 49% expecting an incident or data breach within a month of the report. Similarly, according to the Federal Bureau 394 Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, 2023