Council Post: Bolstering Risk And Cybersecurity Strategy Safeguards The Remote Workforce

Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research with a focus on emerging technologies that enable organizations to transform digitally.

When Covid-19 prompted lockdowns around the world last year, most businesses made the impromptu decision to safeguard employees and allow them to work from home (WFH). Most companies acted efficiently in making this abrupt transition to a new remote working model led by WFH. Now that most people who can WFH (about 40% of Americans) have been doing so for nearly a year, only 12% want to return to the office full-time, according to a new Slack survey. A recent Gartner survey reveals that 82% of company leaders plan to let employees WFH at least part-time and 47% plan to allow full-time remote work even after the pandemic is over. 

As the pandemic drove a dramatic increase in the number of people WFH, there was also a significant rise in phishing attacks. According to data analyzed by Atlas VPN, Google registered over two million new phishing websites in 2020 – 19% more than in 2019. This means businesses need to shift the conversation from “How do we get people to WFH?” to “How do we keep people WFH in a way that’s safe and sustainable?” 

Identifying And Understanding Risks

The first step in creating a less penetrable WFH home team starts by identifying risk. From a business perspective, the biggest risk right now is every remote worker’s endpoint computer, which stores a host of valuable data. Because phishing attacks are engineered to steal personal data, the overwhelming majority of attacks target individual users. Instead of trying to breach a company’s firewall, cybercriminals go after employees.  

Bad actors are constantly devising more creative, convincing ways to steal personal data and the economic, political, health and social uncertainty swirling around Covid-19 makes people even more susceptible to clicking links promising student loan forgiveness and quicker access to stimulus checks or vaccines. Most companies have done a good job securing their corporate networks, but they haven’t effectively extended that security to each employee endpoint.

Lifting The Veil Of Security

Shifting to the cloud in recent years may have given some organizations a false sense of security, because they assume the cloud vendor will take care of all security measures. But even if most of their work is done in the cloud, employees still download a lot of data to their computers. 

There may also be an overreliance on virtual private networks (VPNs). One survey showed that almost 70% of employees said their companies expanded VPN usage during the pandemic. One of the great things about a VPN is it provides access to all of an organization’s corporate resources. However, this can be a blessing and a curse. If a bad actor is able to sneak malware onto a computer using a VPN, that malware can get propagated to anybody else using the VPN. Even though the VPN encrypts traffic against bad actors, it also creates a blind spot for the organization’s security tools.

Combining Infrastructure And Cybersecurity

A combined infrastructure and cybersecurity approach may offer the best organization-wide protection because the same data used to ensure endpoints are running correctly can also be used to detect cyberthreats. Effective IT management tools guarantee that software is up-to-date and appropriately patched while security tools are used to detect potential threats by monitoring anomalous traffic. In the event of a breach, security tools detect “what” happened while IT tools can determine “why” it happened. 

Bringing these two capabilities together can significantly improve an organization’s ability to assess and think proactively about its risk. However, it’s historically been a challenge for companies to get their infrastructure and security to collaborate, because this has to be driven from the top-down and relies on strong collaboration between the CIO and CISO. As more cyberbreaches like “Zoom bombings” become front page news, however, more C-suite leaders, including business executives, need to understand the growing need for a joint approach to operations and security.   

Implementing Agent-Based Solutions

You can infer a lot of information from network traffic going to and from an endpoint, but this doesn’t provide a complete view of what is actually on each device. An agent is a lightweight software run on an endpoint that offers a much higher fidelity look into the activities going on at that endpoint. In 2021, the industry is likely to see a proliferation of comprehensive tools, such as Tanium and Splunk, that bridge the gap between endpoint management and endpoint security.

Agents have the potential to scale up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of endpoints across an organization. Another benefit of the agent-based approach is that it works much faster. Historically, looking for anomalous activity would require a risk assessment which can take months to perform. An agent utilizing machine learning-based analytics can provide endpoint visibility within hours.   

Being Prepared For Anything

Cyberthreats are constantly getting more sophisticated, using AI technologies to generate phishing attacks like fake CEO newsletters to extort tens of millions of dollars. Just like biological viruses such as Covid-19, new, unknown cyberattacks are always on the horizon. The only way to be ready for them is to have technology in place that can constantly monitor workers’ endpoints and fight fire with fire. 

No one could have predicted Covid-19 and the ramifications it would have for people and organizations throughout the world. The lesson learned is that businesses, IT and security leaders need a robust risk strategy to be prepared for all eventualities covering on-premises and WFH and evolving to work from anywhere (WFA) scenarios that protect employees against exponentially increasing cyberattacks. This means being able to adapt to a world where everyone’s WFH, a world where nobody’s WFH and every possibility in between. Greater flexibility means greater business agility to mitigate turbulent times. 

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