BUILDING CONTROLS & TECHNOLOGY
Remote and Hybrid working: Understanding security risks in the new normal
W
With two years of widespread hybrid and remote working under our belts, there is now a much clearer picture of what the new normal will look like moving forward. Mark Guntrip, senior director, Cybersecurity Strategy, Menlo Security elaborates
hile many organisations were beginning to become more receptive to the idea of more flexible working arrangements pre-2020,
a rapid transition to hybrid and remote models was induced out of necessity as national lockdowns and social distancing measures were enforced during the pandemic. Today, they remain popular for good reason. Not only do such working practices deliver time and cost savings for employees who are able to avoid the daily commute, but employers also benefit from improved staff retention, better morale and reduced absenteeism. However, there is a more concerning side to the widespread and rapid adoption of these new norms.
For many companies, adapting successfully in the face of unprecedented circumstances meant making wholesale changes at speed to ensure working from home was realistic and functional. Resultantly, security had to take a back seat – something that was entirely understandable at the time, yet a reality that is now coming back to bite those organisations which haven’t since addressed previous oversights.
Poor security practices adopted during the pandemic
From how the virus spread to the potential extent of its impact and how long protective measures would be needed, few truly understood the implications of the pandemic in its nascent stages. Within this context, many organisations initially opted to embrace temporary solutions and quick fixes, often in the form of virtual private networks (VPNs). These in theory would facilitate a balance between continued productivity and network security, allowing firms to maintain their on-premises-led network infrastructure while controlling remote access to applications. Equally, VPNs were a familiar solution prior to the pandemic, with many firms already using them to provide remote access to limited numbers of people at a time. However, their limitations were quickly uncovered. VPNs were never designed to facilitate mass simultaneous access to remote servers. When too many people leverage them as a gateway at the same time, they quickly become overloaded, leading to traffic bottlenecks and hampered employee productivity. Further, they pose several different security challenges, capable of exposing an entire network to threats like malware, DDoS attacks, and spoofing attacks once breached. Unfortunately, breaching them is something that threat actors have found increasingly easy due to other bad habits embraced in the hybrid working era. Many firms allow their employees to use unmanaged personal devices to connect to corporate applications and resources, for example, providing open doors for attackers to infiltrate organisational networks via relatively simple attack methods.
Attackers are adapting their tactics
It is not just poor security practices that have exacerbated security for firms in the modern era, however. Many that have accepted hybrid and remote working as a more permanent fixture have readily embraced cloud-based operating models and applications. Such applications are beneficial in a variety of ways. Unlike VPNs, cloud-based applications don’t suffer from bottlenecks, instead enhancing productivity with a seamless
18 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER NOVEMBER 2022
user experience while enabling to employees to work effectively whenever, wherever and however they want.
Unfortunately, this transition has expanded the digital footprints of organisations, providing threat actors with ever greater attack surfaces to target and potentially capitalise on via a variety of new attack methods. Earlier in 2022, Menlo Security conducted
research to determine the knowledge and understanding of organisations relating to browser-based threats, surveying 505 IT decision makers at firms with at least 1,000 employees across the US and UK. In doing so, we found that more than half (55%) of firms encounter advanced web threats at least once a month, while one in five face them at least once a week. Further, the survey also revealed that such attacks are not only common, but becoming increasingly successful, with more than three in five respondents (62%) having had a device compromised by a browser-based attack in the past 12 months alone.
Indeed, the high success rates of these attacks is down to the fact many modern vulnerabilities simply haven’t been addressed. Currently less than three in 10 entities have advanced threat protection in place on every endpoint device used to access corporate applications and resources, meaning a stream of unmanaged security blind spots exist.
Creating a security-first culture
Between threat actors adapting to working practices with increasingly sophisticated attack methods, and many organisations continuing to rely upon traditional security methods, firms need to become more proactive to better protect themselves in the new normal. No longer can they simply rely on outdated detect and remediate solutions. Today,
companies must also adopt preventative security measures to ensure any attempts from threat actors can be thwarted. This requires a culture and mindset change – one where security becomes an organisational priority. By making security a leading consideration in key business decisions, vulnerabilities are significantly more likely to be mitigated and avoided. In terms of best practice, firms should work to centre their security strategy around the principles of zero trust to reduce risk as much as possible. Today, many companies continue to take a ‘castle and moat’ approach to security, providing holistic network access to all employees under the assumption that everything within an organisation’s network can be trusted. In an era where attack surfaces have expanded and threats advanced, this is no longer adequate. Instead, firms need to recognise trust as a vulnerability and consistently verify all activities, data and behaviour taking place within the network, preventing threat actors from carrying out their attacks at will with little to no resistance. Critically, zero trust reduces both the opportunity for breaches to be successful and limits the damages that they might cause should they occur.
This all might sound daunting, but rest assured
there are ways to incorporate zero trust quickly and without complexity. Isolation technology is a prime example, helping to achieve zero trust in the truest sense by creating a ‘digital air gap’ where all network content is held and evaluated for threats, preventing threat actors from reaching the end network. For those looking to move away from total
reliance upon detection and response strategies and stop 100 per cent of attacks in their tracks, it is a solution worth considering.
Read the latest at:
www.bsee.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42
