As more people are forced to work from home during this pandemic, it is important to maintain a high level of security to safeguard the company’s information assets as well as its employees. Endpoints such as laptops not connected to corporate network are more vulnerable when used at home. Stressed out employees are more prone to social-engineering attacks. They may visit sites that are usually blocked on a corporate firewall. Not surprisingly, this is also the best time for bad actors to take advantage of this opportunity.
To mitigate these risks, the company’s security office should work with the IT department in implementing the following security measures:
- Enhance user security awareness by using creative ways to make the users pay attention to the message, such as using short video instead of just sending email. Emphasize COVID-19-themed scams and phishing email and websites.
- Identify and monitor high-risk user groups. Some users, such as those working with personally identifiable information (PII) or other confidential data, pose more risk than others, and their activity should be closely monitored.
- Make sure all laptops have the latest security patches. Critical servers that are accessed remotely should also have the latest security patches.
- Critical servers should only be accessed via virtual private network (VPN)
- Users connecting to the corporate network via VPN should use multi-factor (MFA) authentication. Corporate applications in the cloud should also use MFA authentication
- If your Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can handle the load, users should use virtual desktops in accessing corporate applications.
- To support the massive users working remotely, IT should add more capacity to the network bandwidth, VDI, VPNs and MFA services.
- Validate and adjust incident-response (IR) and business-continuity (BC)/disaster-recovery (DR) plans.
- Expand monitoring of data access and end points, since the usual detection mechanism such as IDS/IPS, proxies, etc. will not secure users working from home.
- Clarify incident-response protocols. When a breach occurs, security teams must know how to report and take action on it.