Covid19 – Home Office Health Check Support

March 22, 2020

What is a Home Office Health Check (HOHC)?

Our HOHCs (Home Office Health Checks), or IT health checks, are designed to detect and advise on any security issues you may have with your home office setup.

Why are we Introducing the Home Office Health Check (HOHC)?

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced millions of people to work from home to avoid contracting the infection and spreading it to vulnerable people near them. We recently wrote a blog pointing out how coronavirus could be jeopardising your digital security and giving tips to improve upon your current security, more here.  However, this advice does not always go far enough, with computer retailers and the channel selling out of laptops remote workers are digging out older, and frequently out of date machines.  Machines with expired antivirus, unpatched or end of life operating systems and unsupported applications are being fired up once more. These computers, often infected with malware and running with full administrator credentials, are now being connected to corporate LANs in their thousands.  These neglected laptops open your corporate servers and network up to a massive risk of hacker compromise. 

To combat these risks, Samurai is introducing a not-for-profit home office health check to reduce the risks posed by using your non-corporate personal laptops and desktops while working at home.

The HOHC Offer

Scammers and hackers are continually looking for new opportunities, and Covid-19 is the perfect one. We believe that cybersecurity should be available to all companies, to ensure that their company data is secure while we work from home in isolation. In our effort to help, in the only way we know, we will only be covering our costs. If you want to help ensure that your company data does not become the victim of opportunistic cybercriminals, please contact us about receiving a Home Office Health Check.

What will happen on a home office health check: –

The checks take around 20 minutes per machine, where we connect to laptops (or desktop computers) using a secure remote-control mechanism, this is transparent, you will see all the tests we are performing as we perform them.  These tests include : –

  • Check that all security and OS patches are up to date.
  • Ensure that your hardware is up to date.
  • Make sure that your software is updated and not end-of-life.
  • Ensure your antivirus is working correctly.
  • Ensuring your browser is secure.
  • Investigate to see if your connection is secure to your corporate servers
  • Ensure that you are using an account with appropriate restricted permissions.

We will ensure that your workforce has a secure remote-working experience by conducting these and other tests.  To find out more please contact us here or email us at [email protected] with the subject title “HOHC” and your company name and email address.