Mike Cox, Channel Development & Alliances Director, Westcon UK&I, and Michael Wakefield, Head of Channel Sales, UK & Ireland, at Check Point, cover security after the dust has settled on remote working.
When lockdown began, organisations of all kinds across the world sent their employees home. For many, this was the first time they had embraced home working, and it was done not with months of planning and preparation, but overnight. Inevitably, the rapid transition into remote working left many businesses scrabbling for appropriate equipment and processes, fighting technological fires in an attempt to get employees up and running from home.
This left many weaknesses in organisations’ policies, often including their security postures. Phishing attempts have soared by 667% since February this year, and at the moment, over 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails are sent every day via Gmail; clearly, hackers have been taking advantage of the lack of attention initially given to security. Now is the time for businesses to ensure their home workers’ networks and devices are secure.
Months on from the rapid transition from office to home, many organisations have now become accustomed to their new remote working normality. Everything now feels in place. Any pain points of the last few months have likely been quashed, and business is slowly beginning to pick up again for many.
The priority now needs to shift. Understandably, for the first few weeks, the key area for a number of organisations was being able to continue operating in a remote capacity, to maintain revenues in order to solidify the future of their business. Now is the time for reflection. The likelihood is that caution was thrown to the wind when setting up home offices. Few will have had time to correctly – and securely – set up their remote operations.
Have companies taken the time to set up connections over VPNs or software defined wide area networks (SD-WAN)? How are their employees accessing applications, and how is the business checking their identity? These are three key questions that every company needs to be asking itself right now. If all three can’t be answered then a serious amount of action needs to be taken before it is too late. If an organisation falls victim to a cyber attack, all of the hard work put into operating remotely will have been pointless.
The weakest security link of any business is its employees. Of course, it is rare that staff intend to compromise security, but a lack of vigilance – or even awareness – can be damning. Whether they’re working on their own devices, communicating through Facebook Messenger, or even connecting through their home WiFi, employees could be putting their company at risk.
It’s understandable if most of your staff aren’t cyber security experts. But they need to have some level of awareness. Taking a bottom up approach – where an organisation’s security focus starts with those who have the least knowledge of security – it is a business’s responsibility to ensure that their staff receive specific training. They need to be aware of scams, threats and phishing attempts. We’ve seen the amount of fraud increase significantly since lockdown began, and employees need to be vigilant at the very least.
One of the first things a business can do to prevent threats from accessing their data is to set up VPNs or SD-WAN within their network. Not only does SD-WAN securely connect staff from remote locations, but it greatly improves connectivity, and will go a long way to stopping frozen conference screens and delayed streaming.
With a new risk perimeter, businesses need to take a new approach. With remote users increasing the attack surface – and opening themselves up to new threat vectors – it is important that companies take on a zero trust policy. As networks, apps and data move to the cloud, verification is imperative and companies need to be certain of the identity of people accessing these resources. Identifying users allows networks to remain secure, and keeps attackers away from assets and access.
Authentication
If an unsecure business was a bank, its lack of sophisticated security would allow a hacker to simply walk through the doors, open the vault and take millions without a single alarm being raised. The way to counter that is through multi-factor authentication (MFA). Your password is the multiple guards, dotted around the bank, your text or email verification is the state of the art CCTV system, keeping every nook and cranny under constant surveillance. If the hacker somehow – against the odds – manages to squeeze past both of those and make it to the vault, they’re met by the voice recognition system, also known as the 22 tonne vault door guarding the Fort Knox gold.
Simply put, MFA takes every precaution it can in stopping threat actors from getting into a company’s system. If you’re not supposed to be in there, MFA will go a long way to stopping it.
There are likely many steps that businesses need to be taking in order to fill in any gaps that they missed in the rush to remote working. Corrective action is needed, and it is needed much sooner rather than later. There is a lot of work to be done for a lot of businesses, but educating employees, setting up secure connections, implementing a zero trust policy, and leveraging MFA are certainly a strong starting point.
