Hybrid workplace vulnerabilities: Ways to promote online safety

While remote working offers many benefits to employees, it can be a real headache for employers trying to secure their digital assets. After all, remote employees are accessing corporate resources from various locations and using a broad range devices, which makes safeguarding against unauthorized access even more tricky that what it already was. Fortunately, most of these challenges can be addressed by adhering to the following best practices: 

Conduct regular security awareness training

As organizations transition to a hybrid work environment, it’s crucial to educate teams on the importance of secure work practices. This knowledge is essential to ensure they’re equipped to recognize and mitigate the potential threats that come with flexible work arrangements. Regular participation in security awareness training programs is also essential. You will need to tailor the training content to address unique security challenges, roles, locations and regulatory requirements. 

Training programs should include content relating to the following areas:

• Password policies
• Phishing methods and recognition techniques
• Mobile device security
• VPN usage and rationale

To make training programs more fun, engaging and effective, security leaders can encourage employees to complete training modules by offering rewards, including leaderboards. Additionally, using a variety of training formats can help cater to different learning styles, making the material more accessible and enjoyable. For example, training modules can include videos and animations, interactive simulations and quizzes and live webinars with Q&A sessions.

Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever possible

As the lines between work and personal life blur in a hybrid work environment, ensuring the security and integrity of company assets is more crucial than ever. One highly effective safeguard in this regard is the implementation of multi-factor authentication (MFA). By combining something an individual knows, such as their username and password, with something they have, such as their phone, MFA verifies not only their identity but also the health of their device, providing an additional layer of protection against unauthorized access. This not only safeguards the company’s assets but also provides peace of mind for employees, knowing that their access to company resources is only accessible to authorized individuals.  

Use a VPN to secure remote access

A common approach to enabling secure access to a company’s IT environment is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). A VPN creates a safe and encrypted tunnel between users and applications, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access company resources, regardless of their location. This helps maintain a secure and productive hybrid work environment, while ensuring that an organization’s data remains protected and compliant with industry standards.

It should be noted, however, that using a VPN can provide a false sense of security. While they can significantly improve online security, they can’t protect from all vulnerabilities, especially those that stem from personal mistakes. For example, even with a VPN, individuals are still vulnerable to hacking if they use weak and predictable passwords. Additionally, if a person forgets to connect to a VPN server, their activity may not be encrypted, leaving them exposed to potential risks.     

Block malicious traffic

To prevent malicious traffic from entering a network, security leaders should start by safeguarding their network at the DNS (Domain Name System) layer, where malicious domains are identified and blocked before they can even reach the organization’s perimeter. Security professionals may want to consider adopting a Next-Generation Firewall. Unlike traditional Firewalls, a Next-Generation Firewall is designed for high-performance networks, and are able to handle large volumes of data and traffic. Below are some of the most notable benefits of adopting a Next-Generation Firewall:   

• Performance: They are optimized for real-world traffic environments, including decryption of SSL traffic and simultaneous inspection of multiple layers. There are no compromises on performance and protection, unlike traditional firewalls. 
• Visibility: They provide real-time, cross-platform sharing and correlation of threat intelligence across the network. They can scale across distributed networks, including physical and virtual domains, IoT and multi-cloud environments. They will also provide granular visibility into users, devices and cloud applications. 
• Automation: A Next-Generation Firewall provides automated real-time detection and isolation of compromised devices and malware. They provide real-time deep inspection and use AI to anticipate attacks, and automate threat response and forensic analysis.

Apply the zero trust methodology

Many companies are adopting a zero trust approach which adds an additional layer of protection against account compromise, verifying trust and never assuming it. This approach ensures that remote connections are secure and users can only access resources after undergoing rigorous authentication and authorization protocols.

Adopting a zero trust approach will help to: 

• Minimize the attack surface and safeguard against potential data breaches.
• Provide fine-grained access control to safeguard cloud and container environments.
• Reduce the impact of a successful attack, minimizing downtime and financial losses.
• Meet regulatory compliance obligations. 

Establish unified security

Unifying security infrastructure is key to achieving seamless protection and simplified management. By integrating all security products and infrastructure within a single, unified platform, security professionals can eliminate the need for fragmented security solutions and disjointed user experiences. This allows security leaders to effortlessly manage and maintain their organization’s security posture, ensuring that the entire attack surface — including cloud, corporate and personal devices — is protected by uniform data security policies. This will enable the organization to set policies once and apply them effortlessly across all devices and cloud applications, where employees are working with sensitive data, ensuring that your data is protected wherever it goes.

Monitor everything!

As they say, people can’t control what they can’t see. In order to adequately secure the hybrid work environment, it is imperative that security leaders monitor all activity on your network. This includes monitoring all privileged account access, interactions with sensitive data and traffic flows throughout the network. Solutions are available that provide 24/7 monitoring of critical assets across a broad range of environments, including both on-premise and cloud-based platforms. These solutions will send real-time notifications to the relevant personal when suspicious activity is detected. Likewise, organizations should also implement an Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) which monitors network traffic and other relevant system activities, analyzing patterns and anomalies and alerting security personnel to potential threats.        

Maintaining a secure hybrid environment

To maintain a secure hybrid environment, data security must be prioritized for both corporate and employee-owned devices, and data security teams must unify policy coverage across different channels, including email, cloud, web, network and endpoints to ensure visibility regardless of the employee’s location or device being used. Additionally, robust threat protection solutions are essential to protect employees from emerging threats, such as sophisticated zero-day attacks, phishing attacks and more.