The answer is yes, but the how may be different than you think.

As Jewish families around the world prepared for the High Holidays last month, the most significant days of the Jewish calendar, synagogues prepared to facilitate services under unprecedented circumstances due to the coronavirus pandemic. For those of us that work on providing security for the Jewish community, it would become yet another time of heightened vigilance.

Criminals are leveraging elevated interest in COVID-19 to send emails to unsuspecting people to infect computers with ransomware, malware or other computer viruses. And why not? According to Forbes, the COVID-19 crisis has turned the U.S. workforce into a work-from-home army, giving cybercriminals new, less secure, access points for cyber viruses and phishing attacks, revealing vulnerabilities in cybersecurity strategies for the coronavirus crisis. And since there’s a tremendous curiosity for coronavirus information — people are more likely to click without checking the credibility of the source.

UK Police just announced that crime has fallen by 28% over lockdown, in fact from 12th April there has been a 37% drop in burglaries. As well as the financial worries lockdown prompted, we were also worried about our office and storage spaces, as we didn’t know how long they would be left unattended. Of course, working in security and safety we made sure specific measures were in place to help prevent vandalism, theft, arson or property damage. However, it appears that many businesses are left susceptible to such crimes, by not having many or sometimes any security measures in place.

To get buy in from the entire organization on your role as a security professional, share these basic elements of an effective cybersecurity strategy with the rest of the C-suite.

The fallout from the Schrems II judgment continued with an announcement from Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) that the Swiss-US Privacy Shield regime “does not provide an adequate level of protection for data transfer from Switzerland to the US pursuant to [Switzerland’s] Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP).”

Last week, Didier Reynders, European Commissioner for Justice, and Dr. Andrea Jelinek, Chair of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), appeared at a hearing conducted by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and updated committee members on their work since the Schrems II decision. In his remarks, Mr. Reynders identified three main areas on which the Commission is focusing.

Security fears linger around the wildly popular, Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, and discussions are in the works for the platform to potentially be acquired by Microsoft. Should users be concerned in the interim? Will a change of ownership to a U.S.-based company allay security and privacy fears?