How hybrid work increases your risk of falling victim to cyber attacks

Work has changed dramatically thanks to the global COVID pandemic. Workers across every market sector in Australia are now spending their workdays alternating between offices and other locations such as their homes. It’s a hybrid work model that is certainly here to stay.

But moving workers outside the network perimeter presents cyber security challenges for every organisation. It provides an expanded attack surface as enterprises ramp up their use of cloud services and enable staff to access key systems and applications from just about anywhere.  

Senior technology leaders gathered in Melbourne recently to discuss the cyber security implications of a more permanently distributed workforce as their organisations move more services to the cloud. The conversation was sponsored by Palo Alto Networks.

Sean Duca, vice-president, regional chief security officer, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Palo Alto Networks, says with the primary focus now on safety and securely delivering work to staff, irrespective of where they are, organisations need to think about where data resides, how it is protected, who has access to it and how it is accessed.

“With many applications consumed ‘as a service’ or running outside the traditional network perimeter, the need to do access, authorisation and inspection is paramount,” Duca says.

“Attackers target the employee’s laptops and applications they use, which means we need to inspect the traffic for each application. The attack surface will continue to grow and also be a target for cybercriminals. This means that we must stay vigilant and have the ability to continuously identify when changes to our workforce happen, while watching our cloud estates at all times,” he says.

Brenden Smyth from Palo Alto Networks adds the main impact of this more flexible workforce on organisations is that they no longer have one or two points of entry that are well controlled and managed.

“Since 2020, organisations have created many hundreds if not tens of thousands of points of entry with the forced introduction of remote working,” he says.

“On top of that, company boards need to consider the personal and financial impacts [of a breach] that they are responsible for in the business they run. They need to make sure users are protected within the office, as well as those users connecting from any location,” he says.

Gus D’Onofrio, chief information technology officer at the United Workers Union, believes that there will come a time when physical devices will be distributed among the workforce to ensure their secure connectivity.

“This will be the new standard,” he says.

Iain Lyon, executive director, information technology at IFM Investors, says the key to securing distributed workforces is to ensure the home environment is suitably secure so the employee can do the work they need to do.

“It may be that for certain classifications of data or user activity, we will need to set up additional technology in the home to ensure compliance with security policy. That challenge is both technical and requires careful human resource thought,” he says.

Meeting the demands of remote workers

During the discussion, attendees were asked if security capabilities are adequate to meet the new demands of connecting remote workers to onsite premises, infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service applications.

Palo Alto Networks’ Duca says existing cyber capabilities are only adequate if they do more than connectivity (access and authorisation).

“It’s analogous to an airport; we check where passengers go based on their ID and boarding pass and inspect their person and belongings. If the crown jewel in an airport is the planes, we do everything to protect what and who gets on.

“Why should organisations do anything less?” he asks. “If you can’t do continuous validation and enforcement, what is the security efficacy of the security capability?”

Meanwhile, Suhel Khan, data practice manager at superannuation organisation, Cbus, adds that distributed workforces need stronger perimeter security and edge security systems, fine-grained ‘joiner-mover-leaver’ access control and entitlements, as well as geography-sensitive content management and distribution paradigms.

“We have reached a certain baseline in regard to the cyber security capabilities that are available in the market. The bigger challenge is procuring and integrating the right suite of applications that work across respective ecosystems,” he says.

Held back by legacy systems