Businesses are now required to enable remote access in zero time

1. VPN is not enough

Companies need to open their internal business networks, extending them all the way to employee’s home networks- without employees having the proper tools to protect themselves. Think of it as creating a new window in your house – one with no alarms or locks – as no one is making sure the home networks are protected in any way.

To emphasize the nature of the problem, we concentrated on three key issues that every business should focus on:

A business may enable VPN, as it is considered a security standard and fairly easy to deploy. However, this solution only partially protects the enterprise. VPN solutions do protect the transport from the home network to the enterprise’s office, but what about the home network itself? It is, after all, a valid access point to the network. A hacker does not need to intervene in the transport to get inside the enterprise network – he simply needs to breach the home network, and he’s in. Now as people spend exponentially more time using their work computers from home than the risk that their home computers will be attacked also increases exponentially.

2. The home network is not secured

Modern home networks are connected to naturally-not-secure services like IoT devices or legacy routers, that were never designed to confront highly motivated hackers. Most of these devices are made with low cyber-security capabilities – under the naive assumption that they are simply not that interesting to a hacker.

3. Other solutions are too hard to deploy

Most of today’s security solutions take weeks to test and implement. Recent events have created the urgency to enable secure remote access – and this is simply not enough. Consumer’s need a way to protect themselves as employees from breaches and attacks, especially during this time. The lack of this option leaves them defenseless.

Hackers know these facts – Breaching a home network is far easier than an enterprise one. And in today’s circumstances – they get far more data and valuable resources out of this breach – confidential business secrets.

So what can we do?

1. Device Hardening

Use Device Management tools to harden your work from home equipment as much as you can – use host firewalls, strong password policies, and make sure their OS is patched and up to date.

2. Monitoring

Take a DEFCON1 approach with your security monitoring during this unstable period of time. Monitor the activities of VPN users extensively, and make sure no suspicious activity is happening- in the form of abnormal connection destinations, exaggerated connection traffic, password guesses, scanning attempts etc.

3. Securing the Home Gateway

Our gateway based agent ensures protection for all the work from home equipment and access including IoT devices, preventing attacks from inside and outside home networks. The solution is plug and play for the home, employee and the deployment can be done swiftly.