Take a look around any city center cafe on a Monday afternoon, and you'll see remote workers scattered amongst the tables. With laptops propped open and headphones in, they sip coffee between Slack messages and video calls. The flexibility to work from anywhere has become ingrained in modern business.
While the rise of remote work enables greater productivity and freedom for employees, this dispersion also introduces new cybersecurity threats that companies and distributed workers must take seriously to keep sensitive data safe. The café Wi-Fi snooper is stealing credentials over the shoulder. The hacked home router provides backdoor access to internal networks. The spyware-laden phishing email forwarded from a personal account. The risks are real and evolving.
With corporate data splintering across devices and networks outside the office perimeter, the onus of security falls on employers and employees. The responsibility is shared, but so are the rewards of a flexible, secure remote work paradigm when both sides uphold cybersecurity best practices...
Why Work From Home Introduces New Threats
Let's take a step back - what is work from home, and what does it actually entail in today's business world? Work from home (WFH) is an extremely broad term that can mean a lot of different things. It includes hybrid remote workers who split time between the office and home, fully remote employees who work from home permanently, digital nomads working while traveling, and even just working outside the office a few days a week.
It's important to clarify that working from home doesn't just mean sitting at your kitchen table on your home WiFi. Many remote workers need mobility, so they often work from coffee shops, shared workspaces, hotels, airports, and other public places that provide WiFi access. This introduces risks we will cover in a moment.
The core premise of work-from-home is that employees across an organization have flexibility in where they work. They can use personal or company-issued devices to access corporate data and internal systems outside of an office HQ.
This work-from-anywhere model allows employees much more freedom and autonomy, which fosters creativity, productivity, and better work-life balance. However, having corporate data constantly moving between networks and devices that the IT team doesn't directly control opens up many new potential threats.
Examples of New Attack Vectors for WFH Teams
So, how exactly do cybercriminals take advantage of this new WFH revolution? Here are some of the vulnerabilities that are exploited:
- Increased risk of phishing and social engineering. Attackers will send highly targeted spear-phishing emails to remote workers calibrated with urgency to trick users into clicking malicious links in documents or emails. This allows malware or spyware installation even on secure enterprise devices due to lower security awareness.
- Unsecured home Wi-Fi networks and public Wi-Fi. Your home Wi-Fi is likely protected only by a primary password that can be cracked in minutes with a vulnerability exploit. Public Wi-Fi in coffee shops uses no password, allowing hackers to efficiently perform evil twin or man-in-the-middle attacks through spoofing and code injection attacks to steal transmitted data.
- Outdated personal devices are vulnerable to zero-days. That old laptop covered in stickers? It's running obsolete software full of unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers can attack using advanced techniques like return-oriented programming (ROP) chains to execute malicious code and exfiltrate data.
- Insider threats from credential theft and account takeover. Skilled hackers steal employee login credentials through keylogging or pass-the-hash attacks. Once inside an account, they stealthily extract data using encrypted tunneling protocols like DNS Tunneling to avoid detection.
- Lack of visibility into abnormal data access patterns. Companies can't monitor employees' remote activity and data access patterns, blinding them to warning signs of a breach. Hackers exploit this by slowly accumulating small pieces of data over time, avoiding raising any red flags.
What Employees Can Do to Improve Security
As a remote employee, you are equally important in protecting sensitive company information. Here are five best practices you should follow:
1. Be Vigilant of Phishing Attempts
Be extra vigilant about emails from senders you don't recognize asking you to click links or attachments. That's the #1 way hackers try to sneak malware onto your devices. When in doubt, double-check with IT before clicking.
2. Secure Your Home Network
Set a complicated password that others can't guess, and ensure encryption is enabled so prying eyes can't see your web activity. Also, be careful about using public hotspots to access sensitive information.
3. Keep Devices Up To Date
Just like you update your apps constantly, you should install the latest security patches for operating systems and software. This fixes holes that hackers exploit to steal data. It's automated on company devices but requires manual diligence on your laptops and phones.
4. Lock Down Accounts
When you log into work accounts, use two-factor authentication (2FA) if available. That means you enter a temporary code from your phone in addition to your password. So even if hackers steal your password, they still can't access accounts without stealing your phone!
5. Follow Company Security Policies
Carefully review and follow all cybersecurity protocols and policies set by your employer. These often include rules about acceptable devices, restricted software/apps, data handling procedures, access controls, etc. Also, if you receive suspicious messages, encounter questionable website popups, or simply notice coworkers engaging in risky cyber behavior, speak up! Reporting security issues early allows your company to investigate and prevent significant problems.
What Employers Can Do to Better Protect Data
Companies also need to step up their cybersecurity game to accommodate more long-term employees working from home. There's a shared responsibility here - workers should be vigilant, but employers ultimately have to implement systems that protect sensitive data no matter where it travels.
1. Issue Managed Devices
Employers should provide managed company devices with consistent security controls enabled through mobile device management software rather than your team using their laptops and phones for work. This lets your IT department remotely lock down devices to prevent personal apps and services from introducing new threats.
2. Expand Secure Access
Traditional VPNs could be clearer for remote workers. Instead, modern zero-trust access tools verify identity before limiting access to only the specific apps and data someone needs. This is way more secure and frictionless from any device or network.
3. Increase Cloud Security Controls
Collaboration is now happening in cloud suites like Office 365. However, you must layer on other security capabilities like access management, anomaly detection algorithms, and data encryption to protect information within those platforms.
4. Provide Ongoing Education
Cybercriminals constantly shift their tactics, so ongoing security awareness training is a must to keep threats at the forefront of people's minds. Updates on new phishing techniques, policy changes, safe online habits, and more help ingrain vigilance into company culture.
5. Automate Data Protection
Manually classifying and monitoring troves of company data is only possible sometimes. Leverage data loss prevention platforms that use AI to scan apps and communications where sensitive data travels automatically, restrict bad breaches, and alert IT teams of trouble.
Final Word
Creating a safe yet flexible remote work environment is a two-way street. Employees need to be vigilant - securing home networks, carefully avoiding sketchy links, and keeping devices locked down tight with the latest software. However, companies also have a huge role to play.
They must provide ongoing cybersecurity training to ensure that entire teams understand the risks and best practices in plain language. Companies also need to invest in security awareness and advanced IT platforms purpose-built to protect data in modern remote environments with so many endpoints and clouds.
The risks will never disappear altogether, but with a bit of diligence on both sides and the right technologies smoothing things out in the background, data can stay protected while teams get to work from wherever they need to. Because at the end of the day, work isn't about where you are - it's about having the tools and knowledge to do your job securely.