Maintaining File Security While Working Remotely

These days remote workers in home offices using residential WiFi must maintain a similar security posture as a full-on corporation while working with other remote stakeholders, clients, and partners anywhere in the world.

Daunting? Yes. Impossible? Absolutely not. Read on to find out why.

How to Maintain File Security in Remote Workflows

Keeping a strong cybersecurity posture isn’t a luxury in 2024: it’s a necessity. Especially if you don’t want to lose client and stakeholder trust and end up on an embarrassing data breach list.

Here are six ways anyone working remotely can protect their data and systems from unwanted intrusions and the rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Secure remote connections and hardware

All hardware and connection points among collaborators must be secure. If you use networked storage, configure your device to use an HTTPS connection, ensure you have a valid SSL/TSL certificate installed, and get your data backed up.

You should also ensure you and your collaborators keep all hardware and software up to date and fully patched, along with securing WiFi networks by logging into your router and disabling WPS and remote access, enabling HTTPS logins and WpA2 encryption, and updating the firmware.

Other best practices for keeping hardware and remote connections secure include using a virtual private network (VPN) or desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) platform, ensuring all endpoints have anti-virus and anti-malware protection, and educating stakeholders on the risks of human engineering attacks.

Identity access management (IAM)

Speaking of educating stakeholders, we all know that humans are the weakest link in any cybersecurity posture.

And while security awareness training can help a ton, you also need to protect people from themselves with strong password enforcement and access management controls such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) or two-factor authentication (2FA). Enforcing the principle of least privilege—where stakeholders only have access to the data they need to do their jobs, and nothing more—is also highly encouraged.

Once you’ve developed a list of role-based access policies, enforce it with automated IAM software to keep your rules effective and enforced at scale.

Strong encryption

Strong encryption such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a must when working remotely and transferring data to other remote workers and locations. That’s because even if your other measures fail and your system is breached, strong encryption ensures hackers won’t be able to read the data.

And although hackers can (and do) break cryptography using various methods such as cypher-text attacks, cracking those codes takes a lot of work and know-how. Unless the hacker is coming after you and your work specifically, it’s likely they’ll just move on to a softer target.

Always keep your files encrypted while at rest (and in flight during data transfers). Most data breaches come down to human error, not Enigma-style code breaking.

Watermarking and chain of custody

For creatives who work with visual media, especially—but really for anyone who works with high-value data remotely—it’s also a good idea to use both visible and invisible watermarking, along with tracking all data movement through a recorded chain of custody.

Visible watermarks are useful in that they tell the world a piece of content or file is yours. But a savvy user can also remove or crop them out fairly easily.

That’s why forensic watermarking exists. Forensic watermarking embeds an imperceptible, metadata-infused mark that gives content owners valuable intel on who has viewed their content. This can help content owners track down the perpetrators in case of a data leak.

Forensic watermarks are imperceptible, robust—they should never break, even if the host file is dramatically altered—and are impossible to modify or alter.

The Importance of Security for Remote Workflows

Remote workers who deal with sensitive and valuable data and files need to take security as seriously as any corporate IT team.

While the resources you have at your disposal aren’t quite the same as the head of IT for a Fortune 500 company, there are several simple steps you can take to lock down your workflow, including:

• Securing remote connections and hardware.
• Using identity access management and the principle of least privilege.
• Encrypting all files both in flight and at rest.
• Document watermarking and chain of custody.

By following these best practices and encouraging a culture of security among you and all your stakeholders, you can ensure your data stays secure—and avoid getting you, your company, or your partners placed on a data breach list.

About the Author

Majed Alhajry is the CTO of MASV, the fastest large file transfer solution for media organizations. Majed’s passion lies in discovering novel solutions for complex technical problems, and he is an expert in the transfer of large files, both local and global, as well as in networking acceleration technology and application layer protocols.

Majed can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/majed-alhajry-3a39a410/?originalSubdomain=ca and at the company website: https://massive.io/