Tips to Protect Your Business While Working Remotely From Home

 Tips to Protect Your Business While Working Remotely From Home

Technology changes, life habits change, and the way we work is changing. But no matter how we operate, no one is removing the inevitable obligation to protect our assets in order to keep the business running smoothly, protect the information we manage, and maintain business secrets.

Unsurprisingly, over the past few years, the technical and technological complexity of our business environment and the increasingly expanded network perimeter have expanded the attack surface. Securing the network perimeter is no longer enough: it is vital to secure countless endpoints such as laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and many other Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The network perimeter boundary has become even more blurred as a result of the increased use of practices such as telecommuting. This way of working is becoming more common among modern businesses. In fact, over the past 15 years, the number of people working from home has increased by 140%.

However, the number of people working from home has skyrocketed in the past few weeks. The reason for this sudden surge in the popularity of teleworking is the global coronavirus crisis COVID-19. To try and contain the infection, many companies have begun relocating their employees to work from home. However, many of these companies have started to do this very quickly, and may not have taken into account all the corporate information security issues that may arise in connection with this.

5 Tips for Securing Remote Access to Your Corporate Network

To access the corporate network, most companies provide computers and dial-up connections so that an employee can access corporate services using their own Internet connection. But how can we guarantee the safety of the entire connection process?

1. The computer trying to connect obviously needs to be protected with one of the Best Antivirus Software  with extended protection options. Therefore, to strengthen security, it is necessary to have an EDR system that will verify that all processes performed by this computer are reliable. Thus, it will be possible to stop cyberattacks that do not use malware, as well as complex and unknown attacks, thanks to which attackers can penetrate the corporate network through the employee's computer without his knowledge.

2. The connection between the computer and the corporate network must always be secured with a VPN (a virtual private network). Such a private network allows you to create a secure local area network without the need to physically connect its members to each other. It also allows them to remotely use the data tunnels of their office servers.

3. Passwords used to access corporate services, and employee passwords, in general, must be complex and difficult to decipher to avoid detection. Unsurprisingly, it is important to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to confirm that the connection is being requested by the correct user and is not an attempt at identity fraud. Thanks to this dual system of checking user access to company services, it is possible to more effectively protect access to VPN, to employee logins for corporate portals and resources, to cloud applications. It will even help you comply with data protection requirements.

4. Firewall systems, whether virtual or physical, are the first line of defense in corporate network security. These systems monitor inbound and outbound traffic and make decisions to block or allow specific traffic based on a set of previously defined security policies. Thus, these systems are key elements of protecting the corporate network, especially when you consider the additional traffic generated by remote workers to create a barrier between protected, monitored, and reliable internal networks and less reliable external networks.

5. Monitoring services for networks, applications, and users, as well as response and troubleshooting services are also required to monitor and ensure business continuity when its employees work remotely. It is important to prepare them for the amount of data they will have to process in the coming days. The increased use of teleworking can also place additional strain on network monitoring tools or detection and response services as they now have to monitor more devices and processes. One of the resources that must be monitored with special attention are documents containing confidential or confidential information. For this, we need to have a tool * capable of auditing and monitoring unstructured personal data on computers: from data at rest to data in use and copying. This way, your company data is protected wherever it is.

Good Habits When Working Remotely

In addition to the dangers to the corporate network, the presence of employees working outside the office can also be a problem in terms of safety hygiene.

First, many employees will use USB drives to retrieve data from the office, thereby increasing the likelihood of confidential information leaking through the spread of information and even the loss of these devices. Moreover, in such a situation, employees are more likely to send documents containing corporate confidential companies to their personal email addresses to facilitate access to them at home. In these cases, the protection of such personal email addresses may be noticeably weaker than the protection of corporate email addresses.

With such an increased attack surface and with employees outside the corporate network, the most important thing is to exercise caution. The first thing to do is educate employees about the risks of teleworking, as well as restrictions on the use of devices they use when working remotely. They should not visit suspicious websites or open suspicious emails (especially attachments from unknown senders) to avoid falling victim to phishing attacks.

In addition to the risks posed by the increased use of teleworking, cybercriminals have also taken advantage of the coronavirus crisis to conduct phishing campaigns. Attackers have been sending coronavirus-related emails since January to try to trick users into downloading and running malware. Some of these emails impersonate government agencies sending information about the virus; others look like orders to buy face masks and are designed to get employees to send money to a cybercriminal. There have also been instances where emails were sent on behalf of an employer promising to provide additional information about the company's teleworking policy in an attempt to steal credentials.

This growth in telecommuting due to exceptional circumstances will, for many reasons, become a litmus test for many companies. In any field of activity, information security is a cornerstone. Take advantage of all the resources modern security technology can provide to your company to ensure reliable, stable, and secure remote work of employees.