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:

1. 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.  
2. 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. 
3. Make sure all laptops have the latest security patches.  Critical servers that are accessed remotely should also have the latest security patches.
4. Critical servers should only be accessed via virtual private network (VPN)
5. Users connecting to the corporate network via VPN should use multi-factor (MFA) authentication. Corporate applications in the cloud should also use MFA authentication
6. If your Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can handle the load, users should use virtual desktops in accessing corporate applications.
7. To support the massive users working remotely, IT should add more capacity to the network bandwidth, VDI, VPNs and MFA services.
8. Validate and adjust incident-response (IR) and business-continuity (BC)/disaster-recovery (DR) plans.
9. 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. 
10. Clarify incident-response protocols. When a breach occurs, security teams must know how to report and take action on it.
    
    

Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/cybersecurity-tactics-for-the-coronavirus-pandemic?cid=other-eml-alt-mip mck&hlkid=cc61f434b9354af8aaf986862aa59350&hctky=3124098&hdpid=fd48c3f4-6cf9-4203-bfae-3df232c30bb7

One thing to keep in mind when putting your company’s applications in the cloud, specifically on Amazon AWS, is that you are still largely responsible for securing them. Amazon AWS has solid security in place, but you do not entrust the security aspect to Amazon thinking that your applications are totally secure because they are hosted there. In fact, Amazon AWS has a shared security responsibility model depicted by this diagram:

Source:  Amazon AWS

Amazon AWS is responsible for the physical and infrastructure security, including hypervisor, compute, storage, and network security; and the customer is responsible for application security, data security, Operating System (OS) patching and hardening, network and firewall configuration, identity and access management, and client and server-side data encryption.

However, Amazon AWS provides a slew of security services to make your applications more secure. They provide the AWS IAM for identity and access management, Security Groups to shield EC2 instances (or servers), Network ACLs that act as firewall for your subnets, SSL encryption for data transmission, and user activity logging for auditing. As a customer, you need to understand, design, and configure these security settings to make your applications secure.

In addition, there are advance security services that Amazon AWS provides, so that you don’t have to build them, including the AWS Directory Service for authentication, AWS KMS for Security Key Management, AWS WAF Web Application Firewall for deep packet inspection, and DDOS mitigation.

There is really no perfect security, but securing your infrastructure at every layer tremendously improves the security of your data and applications in the cloud.

With all the news about security breaches, we often hear about external cyber attacks, but internal attacks are widely unreported. Studies show that between 45% to 60% of all attacks were carried out by insiders. In addition, it is harder to detect and prevent insider attacks because access and activities are coming from trusted systems.

Why is this so common and why is this so hard to mitigate? The following reasons have been cited to explain why there are more incidents of internal security breaches:

1. Companies don’t employ data protection, don’t apply patches on time, or don’t enforce any security policies/standards (such as using complex passwords). Some companies wrongly assume that installing a firewall can protect them from inside intruders.

2. Data is outside of the control of IT security such as when the data is in the cloud.

3. The greatest reason for security breach is also the weakest link in the security chain – the people. There are two types of people in this weak security chain:

a. People who are vulnerable such as careless users who use USB, send sensitive data using public email services, or sacrifice security in favor of convenience. Most of the time, users are not aware that their account has already been compromised via malware, phishing attacks, or stolen credentials gleaned from social networks.

b. People who have their own agenda or what we call malicious users. These individuals want to steal and sell competitive data or intellectual properties to gain money, or they probably have personal vendetta against the organization.

There are however proven measures to lessen the gravity of insider threats:

1. Monitor the users, especially those who hold the potential for greatest damage – top executives, contractors, vendors, at-risk employees, and IT administrators.

2. Learn the way they access the data, create a baseline and detect any anomalous behavior.

3. When a divergent behavior is detected such as unauthorized download or server log-ins, perform an action such as block or quarantine user.

It should be noted that when an individual is caught compromising security, more often than not, damage has already been done. The challenge is to be proactive in order for the breach to not happen in the first place.

An article in Harvard Business Review has argued that psychology is the key to detecting internal cyber threats.

In essence, companies should focus on understanding and anticipating human behavior such as analyzing employee language (in their email, chat, and text) continuously and in real time. The author contends that “certain negative emotions, stressors, and conflicts have long been associated with incidents of workplace aggression, employee turnover, absenteeism, accidents, fraud, sabotage, and espionage”

Applying big data analytics and artificial intelligence on employees language in email, chat, voice, text logs and other digital communication may uncover worrisome content, meaning, language pattern, and deviation in behavior, that may make it easier to spot indications that a user is a security risk or may perform malicious activity in the future.