Remote employees are the first to face the initial strike of security threats.
They’re often the root cause of network security incidents that can ripple quickly through the rest of your enterprise. Even if you don’t have remote workers, mobile devices like smartphones and laptops pose security risks.
For all its appeal, remote work is still a recent phenomenon that has left many businesses scrambling to establish policies and security protocols. Even as companies are moving toward long-term remote work arrangements, they still haven’t configured advanced safeguards against cyberattacks and data breaches.
What measures does your business need to adopt to secure your employees’ remote access for the foreseeable future? Let’s review remote cybersecurity best practices you should incorporate for your company’s safety.
1. Maintain Physical Control of Remote Devices
Many security breaches occur simply because workers lose their devices to thieves. In airports alone, a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds. The vast majority of these are never recovered, so your employees need to understand that cybercriminals are opportunists and will look out for those same unattended devices. To protect the gadgets used to access work data, you should:
- Keep devices on your person or securely stored at all times.
- Enable the ‘Find my Device’ feature.
- Avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi networks.
- Regularly back up your data to a secure, remote location.
- Use the most secure method available to lock screens.
- Consider data encryption solutions.
2. Activate Email Encryption
Anyone whose work involves sending sensitive information via email should use an email encryption solution each time they press send on an email. Most email messages are sent in plain text form, across networks, completely unencrypted, which effectively means that anyone spying on a network can tap into that information easily. Email encryption obscures that information as it’s sent, leaving it up to the recipient to decrypt the data at their end.
3. Be Aware of Phishing Scams
Cybercriminals are used to capitalizing on the remote-work wave to flood inboxes with fake emails that deliberately prey on workers’ curiosities and trust.
Imagine this: you receive an email that seems to be from your company about a new corporate policy regarding upcoming holidays. But the email is part of a phishing scam accompanied by an attachment or embedded link the scammer wants you to click on. That click could unleash malware onto your device. As such, be careful about clicking on any attachments or links in any email.
To identify a phishing email, always check the sender’s email address for spelling mistakes and check for poor grammar in the subject line and email body. Hover over links to see the URL and do not click on any links or attachments unless you trust the sender 100%. If in any doubt, contact the sender using a phone number or email address that you can find on an official and trusted source.
While IT security measures can go a long way, effective phishing defense starts with employee awareness, vigilance, and education.
4. Maintain Good Password Discipline
All it takes is one compromised password for a hacker to seize control of your accounts and breach critical systems in your organization. At the bare minimum, all devices must demand password authentication before access, including your Wi-Fi network and router. The National Cyber Security Alliance recommends creating a strong, lengthy password for every online account you log in to on an employer-issued device. Norton advises that a password should have at least 10 characters, excluding real words or personal information (like a birthdate).
Remote workers also need to refrain from leaving passwords unattended near their computers, potentially opening critical company accounts to unauthorized access. For this reason, it is highly advisable to use password managers to generate strong passwords and to ensure that no password is being re-used.
5. Set-Up Multifactor Authentication (MFA)
Having a strong password, although it reduces your risks substantially, often isn’t enough to mitigate cybersecurity risks altogether. For example, it’s possible that your credentials are not properly encrypted while moving within your company’s systems, so an attacker could be able to “guess” them using advanced hacking tools such as machine learning and large password dictionaries.
Implementing MFA at this point strengthens your account and data protection and accurately verifies the employee’s identity with little margin for error. The extra steps could be an email, a text message, a randomly generated PIN, which only the employee would be able to provide. While MFA is not 100% hacker-proof, it will add yet another layer of data protection to prevent an unauthorized intrusion into your company accounts and systems. As remote work slowly becomes the norm, distant connection alerts will potentially be ignored by your IT teams. MFA will help limit the risks that an unauthorized connection is being ignored and will act as a second “gate” to your technologies.
6. Keep Your Software Updated
Updates can often be seen as an annoyance for many, causing downtimes and delays for remote workers. With that being said, they are pivotal in patching security vulnerabilities that have been potentially uncovered since the last iteration of the software was released. For instance, Microsoft recently released a security update to patch a vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain full access to any systems that were not updated. Hackers are well aware of vulnerabilities available within outdated versions of various technologies, which only acts as another part of their toolset they will use when attempting to attack personal networks.
It is even more vital for remote work since so many employees are connecting to their company’s systems and accounts through their personal computers, heightening the risk to the confidentiality of their company’s information.
7. Keep Work Separate
For instance, imagine an employee using their work computer to access personal social media accounts or streaming services. This opens up avenues for malware infiltration through malicious ads or compromised websites. Even personal email usage on work devices may inadvertently expose sensitive business information if those accounts are not adequately secured.
Your remote employees likely cannot afford higher-end technical controls that your business might be able to. Therefore, when possible, employees should limit the use of their personal devices for work and refrain from downloading any sensitive information to their computer, as those files could easily be compromised by a malicious file that has been roaming on their computer without their knowledge.
PROTECT REMOTE WORK ENVIRONMENTS WITH MANAGED IT SERVICES
Even with every possible data protection measure in place, most enterprises, small or big, will eventually succumb to a security breach with one or more of their devices. By developing good routines — such as setting up strong passwords, using multi-factor authentication and performing regular software updates — you can create a secure remote environment your business deserves.
You can also mitigate the impact of data breaches by recognizing the signs of a breach and reporting it to IT services immediately so they can investigate and take any necessary steps. With Yardstick’s managed IT services, you can work remotely with peace of mind as our team will assess and implement the precautions necessary to protect your networks from malicious actors.
Contact us today to learn more about our consistent and reliable data protection, cybersecurity services, and network monitoring services.
