TECHNOLOGY
STAYING SAFE ONLINE
Implementing a Work from Anywhere Policy
By Robert Hessel
Since the rise of COVID-related remote
work, a large uptick in phishing and malware
has been observed. Not only are we seeing
more phishing requests, but we are also seeing
a major increase in attempts to garnish access
to home networks. Hackers know that people
are working from home and that sensitive or
valuable information is more frequently being
transmitted from insecure locations.
As the head of a company whose
information is private and important,
the weakest link is, unfortunately, your
employees. Regardless of whether they are
working from home or the office, employees
should be extra cautious opening links and
attachments from emails. When in doubt
about an email or attachment, have them reach
out to someone knowledgeable for advice.
If employees notice any of the following,
they should reach out to your IT department
immediately: their device has become
slower, they cannot access files that were
once accessible, they see pop-ups, a new
program appears that they did not initiate the
install for, or they lose control of the mouse
or keyboard.
At a certain point, there is only so much
your employees can do to mitigate risks. You
and your IT department must also be willing
to provide them with the proper tools to
protect the integrity of your infrastructure.
Not only should you educate your staff on
the red flags to watch out for, but you should
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also be keeping VPNs up-to-date, constantly
checking your internal connections for signs
of a breach, and updating login credentials
at regular intervals. You may even wish to
provide devices that your employees will
work from when they are not in the office
– this can serve to reduce security risk
considerably, even if it is costly.
In addition to all of this, your company’s
disaster recovery plan should be revisited
frequently. This means checking your backups
(physical and virtual) for safety and making
sure that snapshots are being taken at relevant
intervals. A month-old backup, for example,
wouldn’t be very helpful for a company that
creates hundreds of gigabytes of data each
week. Imagine the unfathomable scenario: an
employee opens a virus-infected attachment
in an email they receive while working. This
then releases a cryptovirus strain that spreads
to the main office, corrupting millions of files
worth of data. If you don’t have a healthy,
recent backup to restore from, your company
is simply out of luck.
Be prepared now rather than scrambling
to pick up the pieces. You can set your
company up for success if you consider all
of the angles now, rather than addressing
them as they become a problem. By protecting
your employees, their connections, and your
physical data, you are setting yourself up for
cybersecurity success. 9
EDITOR’S NOTE: Robert Hessel at Source 1
Solutions can be contacted at (727) 538-4114 or
by visiting source1solutions.com.
Working from home isn’t a new
or novel concept; we’ve been
slowly inching toward a more
full support of fluid work
environments for a while now. With the
dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies
were forced into supporting remote access,
sometimes more quickly than security
protocol was able to provide. As with any
rapid venture that plunges more locations
and connections into the internet, there will
be an increased chance for vulnerabilities.
As we have all seen, the need to work
remotely and keep public spaces less crowded
doesn’t seem to be lessening. Some businesses
are starting to implement a “hybrid remote
work” model, where employees work a
certain percentage of their time in the office
and the rest at home. When we recover from
COVID, it’s still quite likely that our model
for what is normal in the workforce will have
forever been changed.
One concerning piece of this remote work
puzzle is the rate at which networks and
infrastructure are being required to support
heavier and more intensive workloads from
remote users. Rather than having endpoint
users all within the same office building (and
private network), companies are dealing with
exponentially increased connections to their
home offices.
Wi-Fi networks have different security
protocols, and home networks don’t have the
strongest protocols available because usually
this isn’t necessary. It is far easier for a malicious
attacker to garnish access to a home network
than your main office. When employees are
working remotely all over town, the state, or
the country, it can be overwhelming to consider
the opportunity for unwanted access to your
company’s infrastructure.
The sheer volume of satellite locations for
workers, in turn, puts a massive strain on
cybersecurity. Furthermore, it’s impossible to
supervise all of your remote employees’ work
environments simultaneously and effectively.
Luckily, there’s a decent solution to this issue
– the Virtual Private Network (VPN).
A VPN can be set up in your business office
and be accessed from anywhere there is an
internet connection, provided the end-user
has the right software and credentials to log
into the VPN server. A VPN is much like a
portal in a sense. Users simply need to open
the portal from anywhere to access data that
resides in your main office. ADVERTORIAL
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