It has now been about seven months since the COVID-19 virus first arose in the U.S. The majority of the construction industry has survived at least one shut-down and its employees have acclimated to working from home.
As the industry adjusts to the new normal, construction companies must remember to appropriately balance their mitigation and prevention efforts to not only fight COVID-19 on the health care front, but also to step up their efforts to fight the steep increase in “virtual” viruses through cyber-attacks during the pandemic. In fact, the FBI recently reported that the “number of complaints about cyberattacks to their Cyber Division is up to as many as 4,000 a day. That represents a 400% increase from what they were seeing pre-coronavirus.”
In the last few weeks, some states, in an effort to return to “normalcy,” have re-opened many of their commercial sectors that were previously on hold. This new re-opening affects those in the construction industry as well. During this time of transition, the construction industry has naturally focused on setting forth concrete policies to reduce the threat of COVID-19 on its project sites. Some other practical steps suggested by several sources to deal with COVID-19 on jobsites include the following:
However, as the country moves and transitions again into the fall and the re-opening of more businesses, those working in the construction industry should also be on the continued lookout for another type of virus—stepped up efforts by third parties to take advantage of these uncertain times to inject viruses into and/or hack into their computer systems, both in their company’s home office and in the field.
As health care professionals are fond of saying, the more preventative actions taken, the safer everyone will be. The same applies to the virtual world and virtual viruses. During this time of transition, those in the construction industry must make sure that they are implementing at least the following safety protocols to keep the company and its computer systems safe from being “infected” with a computer virus. Some preventative measures that construction executives should take include the following:
Just like the implementation of certain basic changes in behavior listed above can help keep COVID-19 at bay, implementing at least the recommended IT/cyber changes above will help to keep the company virus free in the virtual world as well.
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