Introduction
The reality of today’s workplace has turned grim, in response to the current COVID-19 epidemic. Several companies across the world have rolled out work-from-home strategies. As a result, there has been a massive influx of employees that are working remotely, connecting to their respective corporate networks and employing cloud-based applications. However, this change leaves them vulnerable to cyberattacks and several similar threats.
Organizations need to be cautious about the risks accompanying work-from-home arrangements, including exposure of organisational data and information to personal and household devices. Diminishing the lines between company security and remote devices can affect the level of cybersecurity, or worse, can even trigger cyberattacks.
Therefore, home workers and security teams should try to alleviate the risks that arise out of remote working setups. Let us examine how security breaches or risks can be initiated within the organisation or by outside hackers and what practical security measures can be applied to mitigate these risks.
Threats in Remote Working
While asking employees to work from home, companies might run into several operational risks, such as not being able to incorporate several simultaneous VPN connections into their infrastructure and services. It can be infuriating for the users, who do require access to internal resources. It may also put additional pressure on IT experts if they aren’t adequately prepared.
Although it is not particularly a security threat, it can still disrupt the working and routine operations of the enterprise. It may also place further unnecessary demands on the IT department, that is already preoccupied handling all the ongoing challenges. The other threats may surface in the form of non-implementation of authorization and authorization policies, resulting in unauthorized user access, or even misuse of resources.
To eliminate the threat posed by inoperative remote access, security and IT experts must ensure that the enterprise’s infrastructure, applications, and clients are appropriately supported by VPN services.
Any attempt to penetrate internal infrastructure with an unsanctioned tool should be considered as a network security risk and blocked instantly.
Unknown Implications Of Human Error
When it comes to home workers, there is little to no effective communication between the management and the workers, making companies more prone to human error. When an employee is not sitting beside the person with whom they are habitual to work with and there is no team involvement, then it inevitably leads to configuration mistakes. This further accelerates the rate at which security gaps magnify, and could be exploited later on by malicious or bad-faith actors.
IT departments are particularly prone to errors. This is because work-from-home is forcing them to quickly change and adapt to a new framework. It requires syncing internal routines alongside performing additional external work. For instance, following the transition to a remote workplace, IT experts may require to plug-in new devices and IT addresses into the network circuitry. Such significant modifications will result in the creation of larger attack surfaces, amplifying the chances of errors and false set-ups entering the network during the implementation of these changes.
Security Measures to Enforce Work From Home
To achieve the best of both worlds, i.e. enabling employees to work remotely, while also minimizing the above-mentioned threats, the following security measures should be put in place.
1. Work from Home Policy
It is very crucial to initiate and implement a well-defined remote-working or teleworking policy if the workers are permitted to work away from the office location. These policies can serve to minimize the fundamental risks accompanying remote-working, as it will introduce a set of methods that employees would mandatorily adhere to while working from home. This policy must include crucial information on the security policies, to clarify the responsibilities of all workers when it comes to InfoSec programs. Below are some of the steps that should be incorporated into a company’s remote working policies:
- Figure out device or workstation hardening methods.
- Outline the responsibilities of the employees.
- Authorize the use of a VPN for remote workers.
- There should be an appropriate method for providing approvals to remote workers.
- Make sure that encryption is employed for all data that is stored and in transit.
- Analyze and layout in detail, what employees must do to secure their remote workspaces.
2. Training and Employing Best Practices
It is important to formulate any policy with only the appropriate set of tools. Training and educating employees on the best practices will make it easier and simpler to outline and explain to them why they need to use these tools and follow these policies. Many companies often provide security awareness training only once in an entire year, which is why the knowledge gained through such training becomes obsolete after a while. Instead, organizations should consider including training sessions, at least four to five times in a year to keep their employees educated and updated about security risks.
Homeworkers should be given basic security training including warning them to be wary of phishing emails, avoid the use of public Wi-Fi, refrain from installing third-party apps, and verify the security of devices that they use at their homes.
3. Providing Right Tools
By ensuring an appropriate policy, the organization will help the workers to understand what do they have to do to ensure the security of enterprise data, and how should they go about doing it. Also, it will minimize the risks associated with working remotely. However, tools may vary depending upon the type of company and its employees. Here are some of the examples of tools that can be presented as a part of remote working policies.
- Built-in encryption will ensure that your data is not extracted from the device.
- VPN will make sure that the network traffic is encrypted thoroughly.
- Built-in firewalls will prevent outbound or inbound requests that may seem malicious.
- Passwords managers will assist employees to store their passwords and build secured ones.
4. Ensuring Web Security Protection
Companies should consider expanding security solutions that feature robust web security protection on workers’ endpoints. In addition to security solutions, technologies should be capable enough to prevent network vulnerabilities from getting exploited. The creation of fraud websites and phishing scams has increased, in an attempt to capitalise on workers’ curiosity and negligence.
This is the reason why companies should have a strong defence against network attack and anti-phishing technologies that can appropriately identify and cease such risks from attacking employees working from home.
Conclusion
Remote working can be of great benefit for the organization and its employees, but threats can appear anytime and anywhere. To assure proper security for your company, you have to lay a robust security foundation for the enterprise data and its home workers. Most importantly, this framework must include working from home policy, web security protection, set of appropriate tools to protect the employees and adequate training to make sure they understand their responsibilities. These measures, thus, help ease the burden on the IT department and effectively protect work-from-home setups from cyberattacks.
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