Cybersecurity In The Corona Crisis: 7 Tips For Secure Remote Workplaces

Cybersecurity- In the course of the Corona crisis, numerous companies were faced with having their employees work from home. The fact that the World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus a global pandemic underscores what everyone is slowly becoming aware of: Covid-19 will cause unprecedented levels of social and economic upheaval in today’s world. Numerous companies suddenly face profound challenges because they try everything to enable their employees to work from home quickly. Because of this worldwide “office flight,” maintaining cybersecurity in the Corona crisis poses a significant risk for many organizations.

Cybersecurity- Challenges For Working In The Home Office

Worldwide, 50 percent of employees work outside their main office for at least 2.5 days a week, according to the latest International Workplace Group Report. Covid-19 demands more from the organizations, perhaps even from all, namely to switch to homework immediately. In addition to the pressure this office exodus is putting on IT teams, network architectures, and technology suppliers, there are also real cybersecurity risks that organizations need to be aware of.

Seven Steps To Ensure The Cybersecurity Of Home-Office Workplaces In The Corona Crisis:

1. Make sure your cybersecurity policy is up to date and includes homework. You may already have strong security policies in place, but you should review them and ensure they are appropriate as your organization moves from office to homework.
2. Make sure you have an up-to-date policy on cybersecurity in the corona crisis, which includes working remotely. Robust security policies may already exist, but it is essential to review them and ensure that they are appropriate if your organization moves on to having more people work from home than in an office. The security guidelines must include managing remote access to the workplace, personal devices, and current data protection regulations for employee access to documents and other information. It is also essential to consider the increasing use of shadow IT and cloud technology.
3. Plan to connect BYOD (bring your device) devices to your organization. Employees working from home can use personal devices to perform business functions, especially if they are not given access to a company-provided device. Personal devices must have the same level of security as company-owned devices, with the additional consideration of the privacy implications of connecting employee-owned devices to a corporate network.
4. Confidential data can be accessed via unsecured WIFI networks. Employees who work from home can access sensitive business data via WLAN home networks, the security controls of which, such as firewalls, are not the same as in conventional offices. As there will be more options for remote access, there will be a need to emphasize data protection, which will require the search for intruders on a more significant number of access points.
5. Cybersecurity sanitation and visibility will be critical. It is not uncommon for personal devices to have poor cyber hygiene. Employees working from home can cause organizations to lose track of devices and how they have been configured, patched, and even secured.
6. Continuous education is essential as the number of coronavirus-related frauds continues to increase. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Trade Commission (FTC) have warned of ongoing phishing attacks and coronavirus fraud campaigns. Ongoing end-user training and communication is essential and should ensure that remote employees can quickly seek advice from IT. Organizations should also consider using stricter email security measures.
7. Crisis management and incident response plans must be able to be carried out by a decentralized working group. A cybersecurity incident when an organization is already operating outside of normal conditions has a higher potential to get out of hand. Practical remote collaboration tools, including conference bridges, messaging platforms, and productivity applications, can enable a geographically dispersed team to create a “virtual war room” to direct response efforts. Suppose your organization’s plans rely on physical access or the use of technicians for specific tasks, such as restoring or replacing compromised computers. In that case, it may be advisable to evaluate alternative methods or local resources.

Crowd Strike can support companies dealing with this sudden home office relocation of the workforce in two ways: On the one hand, our cloud-based platform and the lean agent architecture are ideally suited to support remote employees and secure them in a targeted manner; on the other hand, we as a company work “according to our own recipe” in this regard, we support a broad and widely dispersed remote workforce so that we have in-depth institutional knowledge of how this can be done safely and effectively.

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Cybersecurity In The Corona Crisis: Solutions For Switching To The Home Office

In the following, some functions are presented that the cloud-native Crowd Strike Falcon platform offers to enable a quick transition and to ensure security when employees move to the home office:

• Scalability and cost-efficiency of the cloud: An architecture designed from the ground up for the cloud adapts to customer requirements and offers enormous storage and computing power for real-time protection, regardless of where your employees connect from. Working with a cloud security architecture ensures that additional resources can be made available if necessary. Plus, when you support remote workers, you don’t need to plan, prepare, and deploy hardware and software to keep up.
• The highest level of security, regardless of where the employees are: A security architecture provided 100 percent from the cloud ensures that you can protect any workload anywhere, even workloads outside the firewall and even when they are offline. You can also provide real-time security functions with the highest efficiency, along with information on compliance status. Finding threats on any device, especially those that are not on the network, is critical. This can only be achieved with a native cloud solution, as the data is immediately accessible from anywhere.
• The simple security architecture that offers extensive visibility: Knowing who and what is in your network is the basis for proactive security management. Every device that connects to the network must be prominent, regardless of where it connects from. With the single, lightweight agent from Crowd Strike Falcon, no reboot is required to install. The impact on runtime performance is minimal. There are no scanning storms or invasive signature updates to impact the end-user experience.
• Securing users in seconds: The continuous and comprehensive monitoring and detection of the workload on the Falcon platform gives security teams a complete view of each device. This includes devices on-site, off-office, in the home office, and cloud workloads. This transparency also extends protection across containers and mobile devices.
• Worry-free security with endpoint protection as a service: With Crowd Strike Falcon Complete, customers can entrust the implementation, management, and response to incidents related to their endpoint security to Crowd Strike’s proven team of security experts. The result is an immediately optimized security situation without the work, the additional costs, and the associated expenses for the administration of a comprehensive end device security program, which frees up internal resources for work on other projects. Falcon Complete is a one hundred percent self-contained endpoint protection solution that provides the processes and technologies required for all aspects of endpoint security, from training and configuration to maintenance, monitoring, incident handling, and resolution.

The topic of cybersecurity in the Corona crisis will probably be with us for a while. Organizations and their employees will be forced to make serious decisions quickly, and enabling remote workstations is one of those decisions. There are risks in getting there quickly, but the security of your networks, devices, and data shouldn’t be one of those risks.

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