The acceptance of remote work appeared to happen overnight. To accommodate remote workers, businesses quickly modified their business operations. The epidemic pushed IT leaders to rethink their approach to safely managing workers outside of the office, resulting in a digital revolution.
Working from home has various benefits, including increased productivity, improved mental health, and cheaper office space costs. It is not, however, without its challenges. Your remote workers may be putting your company’s data security at risk accidentally. Working from home can lead to data breaches, identity theft, and a variety of other problems.
Remote work brings with it a new set of cybersecurity threats. We already know that your employees are your weakest link in terms of IT security. With 95 per cent of security issues stemming from human error. Furthermore, the remote working environment has the potential to blur the lines between work and personal life. This leads to bad cybersecurity practices such as the use of work equipment for personal purposes.
Cybercriminals are aware that more people are working from home than at any other time in history. It gives them a larger threat surface with more opportunities to breach data, use backdoors to gain access to networks, introduce ransomware for financial gain, or otherwise disrupt businesses on a large scale.
Remote employees are more vulnerable to assaults, particularly phishing.
The rise of remote personnel correlates with an increase in phishing assaults. Because hackers are aware that remote employees may not have access to the same security safeguards as those in the office, cybercriminals have identified vulnerable persons working from home as excellent targets for phishing operations.
Phishing attacks utilise psychological tricks to get victims to give critical information. Unpaid invoices, login troubles, password breaches, and messages from executives or management are among the phishing assaults with the highest response rates.
After all, remote employees cannot just go over to the next desk and ask a colleague to authenticate the authenticity. They also lack in-house IT support that shifted to the cloud to accommodate remote labour may have abandoned multi-factor authentication (MFA), which checked emails for suspicious behaviour entering the network.
VPNs designed for remote work are not built to grow.
VPNs first appeared in the late 1990s as a way to digitise TCP/IP network communication. The principal use case at the time was to connect several corporate offices into a single network. Since then, VPN usage has increased. And with the advent of remote work, many firms have hurried to install VPNs so that their workers may work from home.
VPNs, on the other hand, are not always the ideal solution for working from home, especially when users do not have access to IT-managed and hardened equipment. Users create a virtual network interface when they connect to their company’s VPN.
Printers, file sharing, servers and databases, intranet-based web applications, and legacy programmes may all connect to the company’s network, whether the user is an authorised user or a hostile hacker. One bad actor may penetrate the system, launch assaults, and cause havoc with your systems.
While VPNs provide connection and access to enterprise networks and resources, they do not address password security concerns and provide minimal protection.
Although password managers appear to be secure, they can be hacked.
Because remembering passwords is so tough, many people have turned to password managers. Unfortunately, compromised password managers can potentially reveal end-user credentials.
The Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) determined that several popular password management systems had exploitable security weaknesses, according to their findings. According to reports, popular password managers like KeePass, 1Password, LastPass, and Dash lane are all vulnerable to these threats, allowing end-user credentials to be stolen.
Establish zero-trust policies.
Many firms utilise a zero-trust security architecture to avoid, identify, and respond to cyber-attacks throughout their environment, as the threat landscape becomes more sophisticated and workplace changes to accommodate remote users occur.
In addition to network and endpoint security, zero trust protects apps and data against new and emerging threats by relying on robust user authentication and device validation. Instead of focusing on network security, zero trust focuses on application and surface area protection.
While each firm may take a different approach to zero trust. The principles remain the same, such as establishing confidence in every access request and securing access across the network.
The transition to safeguarding your remote workforce will be simpler and more scalable. This is the case if you deploy the zero trust components such as single-sign-on (SSOs) or multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Secure mobile devices
When it comes to mobile devices, security requirements must be both realistic and actionable. It is to limit the risks associated with Bring Your Device (BYOD). It ensures compliance with a zero-trust architecture. Without a way to enforce your company’s mobile device policy. You will continue to lack the basic protection you need to safeguard against password-based assaults.
We have created a mobile device security checklist to assist you in ensuring that only secure mobile devices have access to business resources.
Conclusion
Businesses must assess the security risks associated with a hybrid workforce as remote work becomes the new normal. Many breaches can be averted if passwordless authentication is used in conjunction with a zero-trust architecture. They can help organisations stay ahead of the curve when it comes to security and eventually phase out insecure passwords.
