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In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, workplaces worldwide have undergone a seismic shift towards remote working. This adjustment involves much more than just allowing employees to access work resources from various locations. It necessitates the update of remote working policies and heightened cybersecurity security awareness.
Cybercriminals and potential nation-states are reportedly exploiting the global health crisis for their own gain. Hackers have targeted an array of sectors, including healthcare, employing COVID-19-related baits to manipulate user behavior. This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide on how you, as an employee, can augment your cybersecurity measures and stay safe when working remotely.
It has been reported that criminals are using COVID-19 as bait in phishing emails, domains, malware, and more. While the exploitation of this global crisis is disheartening, it is unsurprising as criminals habitually leverage large events to their advantage. That said, it’s crucial to identify potential targets, particularly in certain geographic regions.
The data so far reveals a broad geographic dispersion of ‘targets,’ with many countries that are typical phishing targets being hit. However, there are anomalies such as Panama, Taiwan, and Japan, suggesting possible campaigns targeting specific countries. The landscape is continuously evolving as more threats are identified, necessitating vigilant monitoring on your part to stay safe.
→ Dig Deeper: McAfee Labs Report Reveals Latest COVID-19 Threats and Malware Surges
The abrupt shift to remote work has left many employees unprepared, with some needing to operate from personal devices. These personal devices, if lacking appropriate security measures, can expose both you and your company or employer to various potential attacks.
Over the last few years, there has been a surge in targeted ransomware attacks, particularly through “commodity malware.” This malware type is often directed at consumers. Consequently, accessing work networks from potentially infected personal devices without appropriate security measures significantly increases the risk. Both employees and employers are left vulnerable to breaches and ransomware lockdowns.
Office closures and working-from-home mandates due to COVID-19 permanently changed the way we look at workplace connectivity. A recent Fenwick poll among HR, privacy, and security professionals across industries noted that approximately 90% of employees now handle intellectual property, confidential, and personal information on their in-home Wi-Fi as opposed to in-office networks. Additionally, many are accessing this information on personal and mobile devices that often do not have the same protections as company-owned devices. The elevated number of unprotected devices connected to unsecured networks creates weak areas in a company’s infrastructure, making it harder to protect against hackers.
One technology your organization should be especially diligent about is video conferencing software. Hackers can infiltrate video conferencing software to eavesdrop on private discussions and steal vital information. Many disrupt video calls via brute force, where they scan a list of possible meeting IDs to try and connect to a meeting. Others seek more complex infiltration methods through vulnerabilities in the actual software. Up until recently, Agora’s video conferencing software exhibited these same vulnerabilities.
Hackers will usually try to gain access to these network vulnerabilities by targeting unsuspecting employees through phishing scams which can lead to even greater consequences if they manage to insert malware or hold your data for ransom. Without proper training on how to avoid these threats, many employees wouldn’t know how to handle the impact should they become the target.
If you’re an employee working remotely, it is essential to comprehend and adhere to best security practices. Here are some guidelines you could follow:
Considering the rise of remote working, it is more crucial than ever for employees, especially those working remotely, to invest in secure solutions and tools. However, as end-users, it’s also wisest to take extra steps like installing comprehensive security software to ward off cyber threats. These software have features that collectively provide a holistic approach to security, detecting vulnerabilities, and minimizing the chance of an attack.
We recommend McAfee+ and McAfee Total Protection if you want an all-inclusive security solution. With a powerful combination of real-time threat detection, antivirus, and malware protection, secure browsing, identity theft prevention, and privacy safeguards, McAfee+ and McAfee Total Protection ensure that your devices and personal information remain secure and your online experience is worry-free.
McAfee Pro Tip: Gauge your security protection and assess your security needs before you get a comprehensive security plan. This proactive approach is the foundation for establishing robust cybersecurity measures tailored to your specific requirements and potential vulnerabilities. Learn more about our award-winning security products award-winning security products.
In the current digital age, employees must be aware of their crucial role in maintaining organizational security. As such, you should consider engaging in tailored security education and training programs that help employees identify and avoid potential threats such as phishing and malicious downloads. Regular training and updates can be beneficial as employees are often the first line of defense and can significantly help mitigate potential security breaches.
To ensure effective acquisition of knowledge, engage in security training that is designed in an engaging, easy-to-understand manner and utilizes practical examples that you can relate to. Successful training programs often incorporate interactive modules, quizzes, and even games to instill important security concepts.
Effective communication and collaboration are paramount in a remote working environment. Employees need to share information and collaborate on projects effectively while ensuring that sensitive information remains secure. Use and participate in platforms that enable secure communication and collaboration. Tools such as secure messaging apps, encrypted email services, secure file sharing, and collaboration platforms will ensure information protection while allowing seamless collaboration.
Make sure that you’re provided with detailed guidelines and training on the proper use of these tools and their security features. This will help prevent data leaks and other security issues that can arise from misuse or misunderstanding.
→ Dig Deeper: Five Tips from McAfee’s Remote Workers
The transition to a remote working environment brings with it various cybersecurity challenges. Prioritizing secure communication and collaboration tools, coupled with ongoing education and adherence to best practices, can help you navigate these challenges with confidence, ultimately reaping the benefits of a flexible and efficient remote work environment while safeguarding critical data and information. McAfee can help you with that and more, so choose the best combination of features that fits your remote work setup.
The post Staying Safe While Working Remotely appeared first on McAfee Blog.
For Cisco engineers working on Duo, having a remote-first workplace has helped them reach life goals, connect with colleagues around the world, and be intentional communicators. We understand that working remotely can be an adjustment — that’s why we’ve compiled the 10 parts of remote work that surprised our team members most and their advice for navigating the nuances. If you’re interested in being part of a remote-first workplace, check out our open positions.
Senior Engineering Leader David Rines has worked remotely for the past seven years. He’s found that Cisco’s approach to distributed teams has “enabled us to pick up the right talent, and not necessarily local talent. We are moving towards a global, follow the sun environment,” he said.
One of the aspects Rines appreciates most of this structure is getting “a widely varied set of perspectives and experiences that help build a more reliable, more robust product, which is why we’re here.”
Another benefit to having colleagues across the globe is the sharing of recipes, a perk Senior Site Reliability Engineer Bernard Ting particularly enjoys. Proactively communicating with colleagues virtually “helps you to form bonds with people from other teams. You can always learn something new about cultures elsewhere. I talk to people about food and so I’m always gathering recipes from people from all over the world,” Ting shared.
While some may fear that working remotely could lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness, a different camaraderie can flourish in the structure of our distributed teams. With colleagues across time zones, “there’s always someone there who you can reach out to help solve your problem,” Rines said.
Collaboration hours are another way Site Reliability Engineering Manager Jaya Sistla has cultivated virtual community and problem-solving. These hours are blocked off for team members to talk about what they’re working on. “The main thing is being able to ask for help so you don’t go into the rabbit hole debugging things,” Sistla said.
Ting points out that working in a distributed model allows you to really engage in virtual events and conversations. Given that the team mainly communicates through online chat, Ting has found that “forces you to see everyone as equally approachable, which has made me more comfortable reaching out to people from anywhere in the world.”
For folks sharing an office, collaboration can happen through casual chats over coffee. When facing a challenge, you can ask your neighbor for support. While ideally virtual communication could have a similar cadence and spontaneity, the logistics of remote and distributed work require intentionality and being proactive in connecting with colleagues as people and as co-workers.
When Ting first started working remotely, he felt that every meeting needed to be formal and have a business objective. By sharing his feelings with his manager, he was reassured that “socializing is a very important part of teamwork, because if you don’t have a good relationship with your colleagues you’re not going to be able to have healthy discussions, healthy conflict or be able to critique each other when the situation arises.”
Since that conversation, Ting has been more proactive about catching up with colleagues, which can include sharing a coffee over video chat. Duo’s “coffee roulette” formalizes the process as every month, employees who opt in can be randomly paired up for a quick half-hour chat focused exclusively on socializing. Ting has found being proactive about socializing virtually helpful. “It’s made me more intentional with my time and really treasure the social experience you can get,” he said.
Some folks may be concerned that without a manager observing their efforts and work ethic day in and day out, it may be harder to recognize accomplishments and challenges. Ting found that within his team “when you work on projects and in your one-on-ones with your managers, they’re always very intentional about learning what you’ve been doing and seeing what your progress is like on certain projects. I’ve been asked, ‘How do you think you can improve? What are some of the things you’ve been doing outside of the team work?’”
To cultivate cross-team collaboration and education, there are thoughtfully planned virtual lunch and learns. “We schedule training sessions and common meetings at times that are flexible for everyone. If it has to be repeated, we do it so people can comfortably attend rather than stretching themselves and attending at odd hours,” Sistla said.
For Software Engineer Nick Aspinall, an important and fun part of working remotely is keeping in touch with virtual messaging. One unique perk has been getting to create and customize emojis with team members including a few of himself in “various ridiculous states,” he said.
Connecting with colleagues on themed channels focused on personal and professional interests from coffee to pets “makes it really cool because you can meet people across different teams and still get some of the feeling of rubbing elbows that you get when you’re in the office,” Aspinall said. Participating in these virtual conversations boosts morale while also providing an endless supply of cute animal pics.
Given the multi-faceted nature of our work and the importance of consistent information sharing, having different communication channels and formats to communicate data with varying degrees of complexity is vital. Having information readily accessible, accurate and updated is particularly necessary in a field like cybersecurity.
Senior Software Engineer Mario Lopez finds that the variety of information sources contributes to an easeful remote working experience. For instance, for complex architecture decisions or detailing, Duo’s Wiki is the best source.
Software Engineer Hanna Fernandez has benefited from chat channels dedicated to design and engineering topics to “see what everyone’s up to and what thoughts people have,” she said. Sista pointed out these are great places to ask questions and open up dialogue to solve problems.
Our culture is “video-on,” meaning that it is preferred that during video meetings, as much as possible, attendees have their cameras on. Lopez loves this because “you get a bit of that personal human element.”
“We’re all people behind these screens. You definitely get some of people’s personality through text, but you get it more when you actually see them. It’s infectious when you see someone smiling. You’ve got to smile back,” he shared (while we both smiled).
When Fernandez started at Cisco, she was advised to schedule individual meetings with everyone she would be working with on every team that she joined. That suggestion is one she’s applied even virtually.
“It’s a great strategy because I already know that my team is super talented and very smart, but this way I also get to know them as humans beyond their roles,” Fernandez said. Fernandez also finds it important to check in with co-workers and ask how they’re feeling and how their time off was. “I know a lot of people hate small talk, but it’s not just small talk. I’m genuinely interested in how my co-workers are doing.”
One of Ting’s biggest goals was buying his first house in the countryside outside of London. By working remotely, Ting has flexibility in his location which allowed him to achieve his goal of buying a house and settling down with his partner, while giving their dogs the space they need to be dogs.
When transitioning from fully remote to hybrid, it’s important to recognize that there will be some shifts to get accustomed to. As the structures of remote, distributed and hybrid work evolve, it’s important to stay flexible and notice what’s possible through multiple modalities of team building. Many teams have enjoyed in-person gatherings and connecting through virtual lunches and team games when remote.
Fernandez has had multiple roles with multiple structures at Cisco. As an intern, she was fully in person and shared desk space with other interns who collaborated on full stack engineering. While working in finance IT, Fernandez was hybrid and many of her colleagues were distributed among multiple offices. The pandemic began while she was in a DevOps role, forcing her to maintain boundaries around her work time while working fully remotely. In her current role working on Duo, Fernandez is completely remote but advocates for in-person events if possible, because “humans are social creatures who want to see each other’s faces in real life once in a while.”
For Aspinall, “when we did come back to the office, there was a bit of an adjustment period where you were overstimulated from the office.” He also wanted to ensure team members who were 100% remote were fully included. Now he sees that while half his team is fully remote and the other half is hybrid, “that doesn’t stop anyone from doing anything. All of our meetings feel the same. They’re all seamless.”
If you’re interested in joining our team from wherever you are in the world, check out our open roles.
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So you suddenly have a lot of staff working remotely. Telework is not new and a good percentage of the workforce already does so. But the companies who have a distributed workforce had time to plan for it, and to plan for it securely.
A Lot of New Teleworkers All At Once
This event can’t be treated like a quick rollout of an application: there are business, infrastructure, and customer security impacts. There will be an increase of work for help desks as new teleworkers wrestle with remote working.
Additionally, don’t compound the problem. There is advice circulating to reset all passwords for remote workers. This opens the door for increased social engineering to attempt to lure overworked help desk staff into doing password resets that don’t comply with policy. Set expectations for staff that policy must be complied with, and to expect some delays while the help desk is overloaded.
Business continuity issues will arise as limited planning for remote workers could max out VPN licenses, firewall capacity, and application timeouts as many people attempt to use the same apps through a narrower network pipe.
Help Staff Make A Secure Home Office
In the best of times, remote workers are often left to their own devices (pun intended) for securing their work at home experience. Home offices are already usually much less secure than corporate offices: weak routers, unmanaged PCs, and multiple users means home offices become an easier attack path into the enterprise.
It doesn’t make sense to have workers operate in a less secure environment in this context. Give them the necessary security tools and operational tools to do their business. Teleworkers, even with a company-issued device, are likely to work on multiple home devices. Make available enterprise licensed storage and sharing tools, so employees don’t have to resort to ‘sketchy’ or weak options when they exceed the limits for free storage on Dropbox or related services.
A Secure Web Gateway as a service is a useful option considering that teleworkers using a VPN will still likely be split tunneling (i.e. not going through corporate security devices when browsing to non-corporate sites, etc.), unlike when they are in the corporate office and all connections are sanitized. That is especially important in cases where a weak home router gets compromised and any exfiltration or other ‘phone home’ traffic from malware needs to be spotted.
A simple way to get this information out to employees is to add remote working security tips to any regularly occurring executive outreach.
Operational Issues
With a large majority of businesses switching to a work-from-home model with less emphasis on in-person meetings, we also anticipate that malicious actors will start to impersonate digital tools, such as ‘free’ remote conferencing services and other cloud computing software.
Having a policy on respecting telework privacy is a good preventative step to minimize the risk of this type of attack being successful. Remote workers may be concerned about their digital privacy when working from home, so any way to inform them about likely attack methods can help.
Any steps to prevent staff trying to evade security measures out of a concern over privacy are likely a good investment.
Crisis Specific Risks
During any major event or crisis, socially engineered attacks and phishing will increase. Human engineering means using any lever to make it a little bit easier for targets to click on a link.
We’re seeing targeted email attacks taking advantage of this. Some will likely use tactics such as attachments named “attached is your Work At Home Allowance Voucher,” spoofed corporate guidelines, or HR documents.
Sadly, we expect hospitals and local governments will see increased targeting by ransomware due the expectation that payouts are likelier during an emergency.
But Hang On – It Is Not All Bad News
The good news is that none of these attacks are new and we already have playbooks to defend against them. Give a reminder to all staff during this period to be more wary of phishing, but don’t overly depend on user education – back it up with security technology measures. Here are a few ways to do that.
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