The Importance of Cyber Security in Times of Remote Work

The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which originated in Wuhan, China and continues to spread all around the world has changed the way of operations for most of the companies. These companies have begun to face the operational changes when most governments with WHO recommendations have taken drastic measures to rein in the virus’s spread. By instituting these drastic measures by many governments and organizations, the digital world nowadays is getting busier than ever before.

The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which originated in Wuhan, China and continues to spread all around the world has changed the way of operations for most of the companies. These companies have begun to face the operational changes when most governments with WHO recommendations have taken drastic measures to rein in the virus’s spread. By instituting these drastic measures by many governments and organizations, the digital world nowadays is getting busier than ever before.

Given the unusual circumstances, every organization is trying to find a way or another for their staff to work remotely, a growing trend that companies had mentioned last month but that is now playing out in their increased use of workplace software. According to the International Workplace Group report, even before Coronavirus appeared remote work was popular and common practice for many organizations around the world. Moreover, this report shows that 85% of business leaders confirmed that productivity has increased in their business as a result of greater flexibility. Also, Kosbit’s COO has supported this philosophy by saying “with flexible working hours we have granted greater autonomy to our staff which automatically has enhanced their productivity”. The Kosbit has already been practicing flexible working hours for years now and we are all witnesses of the company’s success.

Although remote work offers many benefits such as increases flexibility, improves productivity, and enhances work-life balance, there is also a downside to it. With remote work, there are real cybersecurity issues that can put any company’s sensitive data at risk. Currently, the biggest concern for most business leaders and security professionals is maintaining their organization’s cybersecurity posture during a period where most of the staff related to IT are going to be working from home. According to the OpenVPN study, nearly three-quarters of IT business leaders believe remote workers pose a greater risk than onsite employees. So, for every organization protecting data when staff is working outside of their normal office environment is critical. Today is very hard to protect against advanced threats, which are constantly threatening any organization’s system with a variety of malware, encrypted attacks, and viruses. This is the reason why network security experts at Kosbit rates security as a top priority. Kosbit’s network security experts recommend organizations who have remote workers start and develop formalized security policies and procedures that apply specifically to remote workers, as that constitutes the main part of protecting an organization’s data.

Organization’s Security Policy and Procedures

Many organizations develop a security policy and procedures and then consider that the initiative is complete. In fact, the security policy and procedures need to be revisited and updated routinely in more than a year. Having inadequate security policy and procedures involving access and correct handling of sensitive information, remote workers can severely increase the risk of suffering breaches or inadvertent data leaks. Therefore, following proper security policies and procedures is crucial to help organizations prevent any potential cybercrime. For every organization that has staff who works remotely, training plays a strong role in adherence to security policy procedures. It is highly recommended for IT representatives to hold live meetings with remote workers to illustrate how they can meet the organization’s security requirements. Because security is everyone’s responsibility, the security procedures should be generally agreed to by most personnel in the organization and should have the support of the highest-level management. We all know that remote work’s rise is not slowing for anyone, so organizations must prioritize and refine their policies and procedures sooner rather than later.

Network Security Methods

Beyond the organization’s policies and procedures, Kosbit’s network security experts are encouraging every organization to follow these network security methods and recommendations to better handle remote worker security and avoid any potential cybersecurity threat.

Avoid Public Wifi:

Every remote worker must prevent using tools such as VPNs and password managers in dangerous public Wifi networks. If remote workers don’t follow these suggestions, they will enable cybercriminals easily to spy on their connection and gather confidential information.

Access control:

Every organization should block unauthorized users from accessing their network. Moreover, organizations must permit access to their remote workers only for the applications and tools that they are authorized to work with.

Anti-malware:

Malware development methods such as Viruses, worms, and trojans are constantly evolving. So, in this regard, it is highly recommended for organizations to install Antimalware software on an individual computing device, gateway server, and dedicated network appliance, as it can help to prevent initial infection of remote workers’ devices and root out malware that can harm the organization network.

Data loss prevention:

It is a fact that human beings are inevitably the weakest link to any organization’s security. Every organization needs to redefine its approach to security and implement technologies to ensure that remote workers don’t send sensitive data outside the organization network.

Application security:

Application security involves all measures that are taken to improve the security of an application often by finding, fixing and preventing security vulnerabilities. Due to hackers’ attacks are targeting mostly applications nowadays, application security has become very important. Organizations can find hundreds of tools that are available to secure various elements of their applications portfolio, from locking down coding changes to assessing inadvertent coding threats, evaluating encryption options and auditing permissions and access rights.

Email security:

Email is a common entry point for cybercriminals looking to gain a foothold in an organization network and obtain valuable company data. The most common email security threats are phishing, ransomware, business email compromise. Organizations must establish policies on how to handle email security. As a baseline policy, they must be able to view the contents of emails flowing through their email servers. Beyond this, organizations should implement a secure email gateway, which scans and processes all incoming and outgoing email and makes sure that threats are not allowed in.

Firewalls:

A firewall is a network security system designed to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic which can also prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Basically, a firewall is a barrier to keep destructive forces away from the organization’s network. It is recommended for every organization to place a firewall at every connection to the Internet. Furthermore, even remote workers can use a firewall to protect their home network and family from offensive Web sites and potential cybercriminals.

VPN:

VPNs help maintain end-to-end encryption when accessing remote computers, increasing the security of data being transmitted. Basically, it is designed to make internet usage safer, more convenient, and private. Allowing remote workers to access the organization’s network often involves opening their network to the entire internet. While VPNs create encrypted “tunnels” between remote worker device and a server connected to the internet, no one between this connection can gain access to the data that are transmitted.

Defense in depth (DiD):

Is a security strategy in which several protection layers are placed throughout an information system. It is also recommended for organizations which can help to prevent direct attacks against an information system and data because a break in one layer only leads the attacker to the next layer.

Conclusion

Remote work has been rapidly grown over the past years, a rising trend that doesn’t seem to slow down in the future. Due to this fact, it is highly recommended for every IT organization to start and integrate the remote work into their strategy. It is already been proven that there are a lot of benefits for the companies that use this practice, such as increases talent retention, productivity, improves the staff’s work-life balance, etc. However, the remote work has its security risks and other challenges where organizations need to resolve before starting the implementation of this practice. In this instance, Kosbit’s network security experts recommend every organization to refine its security policy and procedures and to outline how to protect the remote workers from any potential cyber threat and how to handle situations if they occur.