How secure is working from anywhere?

 
As the pandemic passes the year mark, and people have been working from home or wherever they can, the big question is: how are organizations dealing with the many new security issues brought about by supporting a remote workforce? What are the priorities for protecting the network and data? What are the best strategies for protecting this expanded attack surface and the loss of the traditional network perimeter? To find out, Nucleus Cyber/archTIS commissioned Cybersecurity Insiders to conduct a survey of security professionals. The report entitled “The 2021 State of Remote Work Security”, tells us what they found.

Perhaps, not surprisingly, the majority of those surveyed (86%) said they intended to continue supporting their remote workforce even after the pandemic is officially declared over. However, despite this large proportion, three-quarters of respondents noted that they still had serious concerns regarding the security risks of their remote workforce.

In addition, they found that the applications that organizations are most concerned with securing include, file sharing (68%), the web (47%), video conferencing (45%), and messaging (35%). More than half of organizations see remote work environments having an impact on their compliance posture (70%). GDPR tops the list of compliance mandates (51%). Organizations prioritize human-centric visibility into remote employee activity (34%), followed by next-generation antivirus and endpoint detection and response (23%), improved network analysis and next-gen firewalls (22%), and Zero Trust Network Access (19%).

Let’s have a look at their findings in more detail.

Network access (69%) tops the list of security concerns when it comes to securing remote employees. Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) and personal devices (60%), applications (56%), and managed devices (51%) are also a concern for a majority of organizations.

The applications that organizations are most concerned with securing include file sharing (68%), the web (47%), video conferencing (45%), and messaging (35%). This is not surprising because these are fundamental business applications that all organizations rely on for a productive workforce.

Security breaches at the endpoints are a source of concern for many organizations as they look to secure their corporate assets. Therefore, it is no surprise that organizations are most concerned with exposure to malware or phishing risks (39%) followed by protection of data, especially when accessed by unmanaged endpoints (36%).

The biggest security concerns due to the shift in the numbers of remote workers include data leaking through endpoints (68%), users connecting with unmanaged devices (59%), and access from outside the perimeter (56%). This is followed by maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements (45%), remote access to core business apps (42%), and loss of visibility of user activity (42%).

Key security challenges cited include user awareness and training (57%), home/public WiFi network security (52%), and sensitive data leaving the perimeter (46%).

The main reasons that make remote work less secure are: users start to mix personal use and corporate use on their work laptops, increasing the risk of drive-by-downloads (61%); users are more susceptible to phishing attacks at home (50%); the organization no longer has visibility since most remote workers operate outside the corporate network (38%); and users that are furloughed pose an increased risk of data theft (25%).

Just about three-quarter of organizations see remote work environments having an impact on their compliance posture (70%). GDPR tops the list of compliance mandates (51%).

When organizations were asked about security controls, most are using a variety of security controls to protect remote work scenarios. A majority of respondents (80%) use antivirus/anti-malware. Other results for use were: firewalls (72%), virtual private networks (70%), multi-factor authentication (61%), endpoint detection and response (56%), and anti-phishing (54%), among others.

Respondents were asked to rank the importance of different cyber technologies to protect their organization from these threat vectors? The survey found that organizations prioritize human-centric visibility into remote employee activity (34%), followed by next-generation anti-virus and endpoint detection and response (23%), improved network analysis and next-gen firewalls (22%), and zero trust network access (19%).

This report is based on the results of a comprehensive online survey of 287 IT and cybersecurity professionals in the US, conducted in January 2021, to identify the latest enterprise adoption trends, challenges, gaps, and solution preferences for remote work security. The respondents range from technical executives to IT security practitioners, representing a balanced cross-section of organizations of varying sizes across multiple industries.

It's a really interesting report. I did find myself wondering what else organizations should be worrying about with their employees working from home. There’s always the problem of employees using risky apps that they might have downloaded and software that they may have unwillingly downloaded after visiting high-risk web sites. There’s also the issue of cloud-based attacks, with malware being delivered over cloud applications such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint, and Google Drive.

Then there are issues with patches to applications and even to the firmware in remote (edge) computers. Centralized IT will be informed when there’s a security update to a piece of software. It then has to find a way to get that update to all the edge computers in its PC fleet – even when those laptops may not be switched on. In addition, these days, malware attacks can be against the firmware in a computer. So, again that will need to be able to be patched remotely.

Having said that, it’s still interesting to see what people are concerned with. You can download a copy from here.