Securing Remote Employees From Cyber Threats

In this twin year 2020, we have faced a global crisis which compelled many organizations to adapt to the changes to ensure their business continuity. Work from office to work from home is one of the major shifts that businesses have incorporated. We now have the largest remote workforce in human history, and many companies are struggling to secure them from potential cyber threats. This leads to the requirement of educating your employees to save them from potential risks and build a strong security shield for your remote workforce while they are working on VPN, Wi-Fi or personal network and using their devices.

According to Google, in April, there were more than 18 million daily malware and phishing email cases related to COVID-19 in just one week. The stats are enough to prove that we are in a much bigger zone of cyber-attacks than ever and how essential it is to look after on the cybersecurity for both organizations and employees. There are two aspects where we can work on and ensure secure remote workforce.

1. Educating your employees and establishing teleworking policy so, that everyone adheres to the standard approach of working from home and be vigilant about cyber-threats.
2. Secondly, as an organization, you can secure your remote endpoints and web applications by integrating respective tools for the same.

1.1 Educating employees

Conduct an internal survey among your employees to gauge their knowledge about cyber-threats, based on the survey results, execute a small internal campaign. This may include types of cybersecurity attacks, do’s and don’ts, measures, and a dedicated help email ID within the organization where they can report any malicious activity or quickly connect with the concerned team for the solutions.

Regular email updates regarding how to detect and stay away with phishing emails, malware, Ransomware and Watering hole attack. Besides that, informative collaterals and videos can be created and circulated among employees.

1.2 Have a teleworking policy:

Regulating your remote employees also acts as a layer of shield, among other initiatives to protect your organization’s data and information. It is important to develop a corporate policy around BYOD and teleworking. This policy should define the limit and give complete visibility of employees in the form of remote access, guidelines for device usage based on company-issued or personal devices, network usage, and how internal data and confidential information will be managed. A robust and stringent policy will help your organization to keep track of employee activities and guard on their resources and information.

2.1 Securing remote endpoints

Securing remote endpoints is one of the strongest covers you can have for remote employees, especially when they are working on their devices and using a home network, VPN, Wi-Fi, or LTE. With the help of endpoint management, employees can enroll their devices and automatically install critical applications, patches, policies, and configurations to have a secure, consistent, and reliable computing environment just like their office location.

BigFix provides 4-step solutions to enable secure, remote telework with continuous patching and compliance management with or without VPN, using a single agent, a single firewall port, all in a single solution.

2.2 Securing Web Apps

The work from home shift has increased our dependency on web apps for communication, collaboration, and data/information sharing within or outside the organization. We use a lot of open-source software to ease out our work, and it is better to detect and remediate the vulnerabilities of such apps before employees use them.

There is software available which can perform testing of such apps and ensure their security before they are deployed to users. AppScan is one of the industries-leading cloud-based application security testing suites to perform static, dynamic, and interactive testing on web, mobile and open-source software. Comprehensive management capabilities enable security professionals and compliance officers to continuously monitor the security posture of their application and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

Securing your remote workforce is a challenging task, but it is achievable. We need to identify all touchpoints where there is a risk of security and need to create several layers of actions points to build a strong shield against cyber threats which start from employees’ vigilance, organization’s regulation and strong infrastructure, and set up to monitor, detect and secure any risk on their networks and devices by ensuring secure endpoints and app security.

Explore more tips and solutions around cybersecurity awareness month- #BeCyberSmart