NETWORK SECURITY FOR REMOTE WORKERS: Cyber security challenges and security tips for remote workers

welcome to this very seasonal edition of chromecast check it out i'm sam major and here once again with my christmas helper mr rupert mills my co-founder and business partner we're here to discuss simple strategies for helping to score the remote workforce which is especially prevalent over the festive season so with the increase in remote working over recent months and months and months and months we've seen a clear that obvious increase in the threat landscapes that our customers are having to deal with what do you feel is the most overlooked area of security since the proliferation of hyper agile remote working i sound about overlooked i think the traditionally it environments have been sort of either in the office with people working remotely or have been entirely sort of devolved and people are allowed to do what they like with machines and devices etc most corporates have some sort of security policy some sort of compliance some sort of uh edit of things they have to to stick together with and from that perspective you've got policies and and procedures that are applied to devices i think the challenge has been for those people to get those down onto those devices when everybody's working remotely or to continue to manage and operate those end user compute whatever format it takes devices in a fashion that they would have done when they were all in the office people used to rely on them coming into an office on a periodic basis so you'd have people working from home to three days a week or three weeks a month or whatever it might be but you could generally rely on every so often those devices will pop up on the corporate land and be able to be managed and i think managing that threat landscape now out about is a challenge i think the overall addition of basically you've extended what was a confined ecosystem out into a much wider ecosystem with all of these people at home that addition has meant that people's security boundary is no longer there it's over here so i think that's the challenge that people are facing right now you've already mentioned that people are having to visit the office less clearly so we're not getting the opportunity to patch machines as regularly or normally as we would so it's paramount we have the right tool sets in place to manage that but also uh the you know again as a business owner that we educate our staff around the right behaviors um given both of those what do you think is is key to focus on to ensure that end-to-end security i think that in our environment what we did was we rolled out an always-on vpn solution um so that actually those people who are remote or effectively extended an extension of the corporate network anyway there are cloud solutions to resolve that as well so there's a whole bunch of new microsoft stuff sitting within their um cloud platform and azure active directory things like defender atp and bits and pieces like that that can help you keep control of what's out there there's there's a lot of different products out there but fortunately for us and for most of our customer base we've been working with palo alto for a long time palo alto networks and their security products allow us to roll out an always-on vpn solution that is very well managed and allows us to use certificate-based authentication so every machine has a certificate and as it boots it will authenticate with the vpn using that certificate to ensure it is the correct machine but then effectively applies all the policies and details to that machine as if it was in the office before the user logs on so they can then log on using the usual multi-factor authentication whatever they however you choose to secure your remote users but essentially they're treated as though they're in the office at that point that allows corporate policies updates et cetera to be managed using the existing toolset so where you've got all those new cloud tools that you could roll to and say actually we're going to go and roll out various different microsoft tool sets that have come along to manage windows 10 deployments et cetera they're great and they will come in time but rather than rushing to deploy those and trying to get them out in a sort of quick and dirty fashion what we've been able to do is allow people to continue using the existing tool set carry on managing the devices exactly as they were when they're in the office by extending the boundary of the office virtually to wrap around that machine it doesn't bring in to scope people's individual i.t in their houses etc because it's just that laptop or device yeah but it does wrap that back inside the corporate envelope so on that point uh just thinking obviously we saw clearly there was a lack of hardware when everyone was pushed uh mandatory working remotely um there was a shortage industry-wide of notebooks and we certainly saw a lot of customers buying non-standard machines to their environment um now that has settled for the most part but there is still a lot that hardware that's out there so in that case when someone's had to go and get something that's not on their standard corporate catalogue they've brought that they've brought it home how do we enforce these policies like always on vpn uh and bring that security immediately to the fall so there's uh going back to that sort of new microsoft tooling there's things like autopilot and things like that you can use to roll out to it or there's your traditional byod approaches so things like citrix or some sort of virtual desktop solution where people are dialing into a corporate desktop experience but not actually on the device they're using so it's really a decision based around what tool set the organization has in place and how we can manipulate that to provide what they need or alternatively what the business requirement is and which tool set we can overlay with that to add in something to do that i think a lot of people right now are going back to trying to manage those devices that were bought in a hurry and that's certainly something that's sort of retrofitting if i want a better way of putting it we've been able to roll out always on vpn retrospectively out to a whole bunch of clients who've got palo alto security devices in place so we've been able to say okay let's go back and roll that out and then brings things inside the corporate network which which works or there's the possibility of not currently i'm guessing but with the possibility of people doing a temporary step into the office get that device on the network and then manage it externally but generally rolling something out remotely something like autopilot or something like using an always-on vpn or a vpn client and then rolling that over to be always on will be an option for organizations either that or as i say keeping that device completely outside of the circle of trust and using a citrix or similar device or solution clearly we've seen that the office is now everywhere you know remote working isn't anything new but it's more now than ever yeah this is the new normal the next normal normal normal um but people are working from from anywhere possible uh and we have seen real world examples of people working potentially places that aren't secure and have had passwords read over their shoulder so in this new age um what technologies um should we be looking at to protect ourselves against that type of threat and also how do we go about educating uh and imposing the right behaviors on our staff to counter this new proliferation of ways of working it starts with security by design things need to be fit for the purpose they're they're needed for designed for the purpose they need it for needs to be not overly draconian because otherwise people will avoid using it um but yeah security by design so you make sure that you layer on the security depending on the sensitivity of the data what tends to happen in that situation is people tend to try and work around the system so you find that they're not actually following the security best practices or they're not actually adhering to your solution in the way you thought they would so your security becomes null and void essentially i think it's vitally important that you look at the various different data that you hold the various different resources that people have access to and work out how that security needs to be layered on there'll be much more critical security for certain types of compliance data or things like pci dss or hipaa data or anything like that the security requirements around that are going to be much higher than something that's of a less sensitive nature lower classification data doesn't require that level of sensitivity and actually if you can try and get your solution whichever it is to layer the security so that you don't prohibit people from working smoothly and quickly but secure the important data in the way it should be you'll get a better end user experience but then you come back to the end users and the key point there from my perspective is education ultimately if people know why you're doing something and they know what the implications of it are then you can probably get them to buy into the security and to learn how to use it in a much better fashion than if they're just told that's the way it is and you just have to live with it i think it's actually educating people on why things are secure why things have to be a certain way so right now for example coming into the festive season you've got things like fishing attacks and a common one out there at the moment is amazon uh with a lot of people the amazon business over the past 12 months has absolutely skyrocketed there are people out there who've got prime accounts who never did before people out there who've signed up and bought an awful lot of stuff on amazon consequently the number of phishing attacks coming back from people trying to get credit card data personal data whatever it might be pretending to be amazon is absolutely huge at the moment along with the common ones of things like hmrc and other other things um but educating people as to what that is so that when they see something they don't immediately go oh hang on i've ordered my christmas presents i need to log in and give them my credit card information because there's a bad start um but actually educating people as to why they're likely to see that sort of thing and what to do about it and how to tell if it is or not um along with why you're putting security in place i think just education for people is key so as we move into the festive season clearly we won't be meeting up in the same way that we used to um so more and more people are using things like zoom and house party and essentially non-corporate standard apps in many cases or you know i'm sure no one would let their child use their corporate device or anything that's not corporate work clearly um but it does open us up to an even greater threat landscape you know we put these apps on we're inviting malware in unknowingly but it's still there it's still something we need to take into consideration and and and to address so i guess you know what is your opinion or how do you think that's best uh addressed because it's going to become more more prevalent as we get towards christmas we can't see each other physically so that kind of virtual interaction will only increase so yeah using corporate devices for home use is gonna happen uh to some extent i think there's a challenge for businesses into how they kind of balance what they allow people to do with making sure that it fits all their corporate policies i think there's a big thing to be said about potentially not allowing people to install applications but allow them to use something as browser-based if they use for example a browser-based client for zoom or for um whatever it might be webex for skype for teams whatever if they use a browser-based client for that and you're using an always-on vpn scenario you can tunnel that traffic back through your firewalls for protection there's obviously the zero-day threat protection stuff that goes alongside uh paulo's so there's the cortex products that they've got which allow you to keep secure in a next level up from sort of traditional antivirus what's going on on those devices as well which we've got deployed out internally and for a number of organizations that we work with that will protect against certain apps coming down and talking about apps obviously you then move into things like tablets mobile devices etc making sure that they're managed in some way so things like airwatch or in tune having some sort of solution that can push policy out to those devices and can maintain what can and can't be installed you can if you're a big enough organization go all the way down to having a custom app store so people can't have their own apps and they can't pick normal apps so you could cherry pick which apps they are and aren't allowed to install um along with just a straightforward policy of saying no you could have a custom windows 10 app store for example to windows 10 to allow people to install certain apps but the overriding one for me is okay if you control what's done in a browser and you make it browser-based then potentially that's safer than someone being able to install an application locally on a machine so but generally corporate policy doesn't allow that anyway these days it's really trying to facilitate what you can to help people while they're at home and in difficult situations whilst making sure that you don't leave yourself at risk you mentioned around the palo alto cortex product obviously had the zero day threat option element can you talk us through a little bit more about that and how that works because i know clearly we use that internally we've never had a breach touchwood but i think that's a really interesting product to my mind is is replacing traditional antivirus certainly is being coupled with but we've seen installations now where people have removed traditional anti-virus and working with a zero-day threat product be interesting just tell us a little bit more about that sure so the zero-day intention of a zero-day product is it doesn't work by definitions traditional antivirus works with a dictionary of definitions and says i've seen that before i know that's a virus most of the zero-day products out there in the market and there's a lot of them now so they work by behaviors they take behavioral traits of what malware or some sort of infection or a virus might be doing and trying to do on your machine and they recognize that behavior so if it starts trying to access system files or do certain things that that are key behaviors of that type of um that type of threat what it does is is blocks them based on that behavior rather than based on the definition the idea being that traditionally you used i mean years ago you used to get your anti-virus updates once a month once a week once a night became common practice and then you find that actually threats are evolving so fast in the modern landscape that they can be out there for 10-15 minutes and you'll be attacked and so once and once a night update of your anti-virus isn't good enough anymore so zero-day threat protection is what's coming in alongside the sort of traditional anti-virus approach but what we've seen a lot of customers doing with the sort of advent of windows 10 is moving to the microsoft defender approach to replace the traditional antivirus and layering the budget from their antivirus solution on top of that with a zero day or a more modern take on protection there so it's in my mind a more effective way to spend your budget and to protect yourself across multiple different landscapes if you have the microsoft threat protection from windows 10 or atp totally great fits in very well with the security services that we offer to actually go in and do vulnerability assessments look at that not just from a technology perspective but from that behaviors perspective you know how do you access where do you access should you access et cetera et cetera and then actually working with a client base to to educate them uh and you know be aware of phishing attacks and so on and something we've seen everyone i'm sure probably experienced at some point some sort of phishing attacking their inbox and educating people how to recognize that that is nefarious you know don't click on that or don't respond to that uh and that's why i said part of that is that behavioral piece to go with the technology side of it is let's educate people and best arm them as it were yeah if you can bring those machines into scope somewhere lock them down or secure them in a way that's user friendly that kind of gives you one level of protection and then educating people gives them another level i mean we've seen in this organization with the two of us as senior members of the team we've seen phishing attacks where people find our details on linkedin and then try and pretend to be us back to our own team uh fortunately they generally know us and they generally know if something's us or not but it's it's a very common thing of all those various different acts happening and it's just that education pieces told people no that's not rupert or that's not sam absolutely i won't believe it no what i think it's key i think it's the um education and technology yep perfect absolutely thank you okay well merry christmas uh thank you for joining us on this edition of chromecast check out please remember to like comment share and subscribe and any questions as always add them in the comments it helps us shape future content so thanks very much merry christmas merry christmas

Channel: Krome Technologies

Views: 238

Keywords: network security for remote workers, Security tips for remote workers, Cyber security for remote workers, How to protect against phishing, Remote workforce cyber security, cybersecurity vulnerability assessment, remote worker cybersecurity, Palo Alto Networks Always On VPN, cybersecurity challenges, Always On VPN, palo alto networks cortex, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, phishing attacks, best practices for information security, remote workforce security, infosec

Id: S6h2ZAlSSi0

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020