The devices employees use as they work from home could be the ones that put their companies at risk.

With businesses continuing to support remote and hybrid workplaces, more employees are connecting more of their personal devices to corporate networks, yet these devices aren’t always well protected from malware, breaches, and theft—which can affect them and the companies

they work for.

Prior to the pandemic, a major topic for employee and business security was BYOD, or “bring your own device.” And it remains so. That catchy little abbreviation took root several years ago as many employees started bringing their own devices to work for both personal and business use, whether that was their smartphone for company calls and email or swapping files once in a while with an external drive or a USB stick.

The argument for BYOD is that it potentially increases employee productivity by allowing people to use the devices they’re familiar with—plus that company can save on costs by having employees bring their own tech into the office. However, there’s a flip side. Because these devices can and often do connect to sensitive corporate resources and data, they can potentially compromise those very same resources and data. Unless they have strong security in place, which they often do not. Employees simply don’t always protect their own devices.

Our most recent global research shows that only 68% of adults say that they protect their laptops with basic antivirus protection. Note that basic antivirus does not include comprehensive security software that also protects them from the pandemic and post-pandemic rise in account theft, ransomware, email fraud, and phishing attacks. With this, only 68% of adults employ baseline protection, let alone more thorough protections beyond that. 

This figure drops dramatically when it comes to protecting their smartphones, classically the leading BYOD device in the corporate landscape. Here, only 41% of adults said they protect their phones with basic antivirus. Moreover, only 56% said they protect their smartphone with a password or passcode to unlock it—making nearly half of them an open book to cyber crooks in the event of loss or theft. 

Now, with remote and hybrid workplaces becoming more commonplace, BYOD gets all that much more complicated. Businesses are now faced with an unprecedented number of BYOD devices on their networks. In the U.S. alone, a Gallup poll found that half of the full-time workforce was “remote capable,” some 60 million people in all.  

Of them, 53% said they expect to work in a hybrid model moving forward and another 24% to work fully remotely. That means somewhere around 46 million workers in the U.S. will work remotely in some form or fashion and will likely use one or more of their own devices to do so—a clear concern for any security-minded business if these employee devices remain unprotected.  

The realities of BYOD and WFH 

In an ideal world, employees would stick to some hard and fast rules about device usage. They’d do their work on one laptop and then use another for streaming shows, doing their shopping, playing games, managing their finances and so on. Yet that doesn’t appear to be the case.  

A recent global study found that 55% of remote workers use a personal laptop or smartphone for work at least part of the time. Moreover, this begs the question if the employee is the only one using that BYOD device. After all, they’re likely working in their own home, where other family members may use that device to some extent as well, which adds yet more security risks for businesses. With multiple users on a single device, the additional browsing, downloading, emailing, and shopping could expose that device to more security risks than from a single user alone. 

Unlike company-issued devices, employee-owned devices aren’t subject to the centralized policies and protections that corporate IT can put in place. This leads to devices on the corporate network that may be without up-to-date antivirus protection, have malicious apps on them, or use browsers with compromised extensions that illicitly gather data on their users. 

Once again, with employees sometimes taking lax, if any security measures to protect their devices, this can present serious risks to the business, such as the dramatic rise in business email compromise. As reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), businesses lost $2.4 billion in 2021 to this form of scam alone. Meanwhile, phishing attacks, device theft, and credential theft all remain painfully common forms of attack on small and mid-sized businesses. 

How online protection for employees makes for a more secure business 

One way businesses can address these issues is by helping employees do what they haven’t done for themselves—provide them with comprehensive online protection software as a company benefit. 

Comprehensive online protection goes beyond basic antivirus (which as we’ve seen, only 68% of people use). It covers the three pillars of security—privacy, identity, and device security, and by protecting those three things for their employees on their BYOD devices, companies can then protect themselves.  

A brief list illustrates several of the top ways online protection for remote employees can help keep the business secure: 

1) Protect company information as it travels 

If your company doesn’t already support one, employees can use a VPN to create an encrypted tunnel when they connect to the company network, which makes it highly difficult for bad actors to intercept that traffic. Our secure VPN uses bank-grade AES 256-bit encryption to help keep data and information safe. 

2) Shield company data and resources from attacks 

With one bad click, a phishing attack in email, text, or direct message may give an attacker access to login credentials or to install malware known as a keylogger that can likewise steal usernames and passwords. Safe web browsing features found in online protection can help sidestep these attacks before they happen with clear warnings of risky websites, links, files, and other attachments. 

3) Strong, unique passwords for all 

When it comes to employee passwords, no two should be alike. Yet with dozens of logins of their own, in addition to the ones they use exclusively for work, that’s a rule few people follow. A password manager can help. It can store, auto-fill, and even generate strong, unique passwords for each account—across computers, laptops, and smartphones. 

4) Digitally shred sensitive documents permanently 

Employees can permanently delete sensitive files with an application such as McAfee Shredder, which removes files so that thieves can’t access them. (Quick fact: deleting files in your trash doesn’t actually delete them in the truest sense. They’re still there until they’re “shredded” or otherwise overwritten such that they can’t be restored.) 

5) Device protection that goes beyond the basics 

Absolutely, antivirus is a must. Comprehensive online protection will include that, and much more. Ours offers that in addition to protection that safeguards your employee’s identity and privacy—along with a personalized Protection Score that checks the health of their online protection and provides simple steps to improve their security. 

Think about theft and loss as well 

Beyond online protection software, is remote locking and wiping of devices. We’ve mentioned physical loss and theft of devices as a significant security issue. Many laptops and mobile devices offer location tracking services to help locate a lost device—and yet others allow the owner to remotely lock or even wipe the contents of that device if they fear it’s lost for good or fallen into the wrong hands.  

Showing employees how to enable and use these features can further protect all parties involved in such a worst-case scenario. Apple provides iOS users with a step-by-step guide for remotely wiping devices and Google offers up a guide for Android users as well. For laptops, Microsoft and Apple users can enable the following settings:   

Windows: Enable in Settings > Update & Security > Find my device 
macOS: Setup iCloud on your device. Enable via Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Find My Mac 

Online protection—good for employees, good for business 

By providing employees with comprehensive online protection that complements the security measures the company already has in place, they get the benefit of a far safer time online for themselves. Potentially their families as well. In turn, because they’re more secure, the business is more secure—an important point to consider when millions are still working from home on their BYOD devices.  

The post WFH Unprotected: How Organizations Can Keep Their Employees and Their Business Safer appeared first on McAfee Blog.

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NanoLock has announced the launch of a new suite of zero-trust cybersecurity solutions for the industrial and manufacturing market. In a press release, the firm claimed to be the first to offer device-level protection solutions designed specifically for legacy and new industrial machinery and smart factory production lines. The launch comes in the wake of a joint cybersecurity alert surrounding advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks on industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices.

To read this article in full, please click here

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A new open-source project aims to unify incompatible cloud identity systems such as Azure, AWS and Google, giving users the ability to apply consistent identity and access policies across multi-cloud platforms. Announced by identity orchestration firm Strata Identity, the project consists of Hexa, an open-source technology, and IDQL, a new common policy format that defines identity access policies, which combine to manage access policies across multi-clouds, on-premises systems, and vendors, the company said. The news comes in the wake of research that laid bare the security risks surrounding mismanaged, overly-permissive cloud identities that open the door to attackers targeting cloud infrastructure.

To read this article in full, please click here

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Researchers have demonstrated iPhone malware that works even when the phone is fully shut down.

t turns out that the iPhone’s Bluetooth chip­ — which is key to making features like Find My work­ — has no mechanism for digitally signing or even encrypting the firmware it runs. Academics at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt figured out how to exploit this lack of hardening to run malicious firmware that allows the attacker to track the phone’s location or run new features when the device is turned off.

[…]

The research is the first — or at least among the first — to study the risk posed by chips running in low-power mode. Not to be confused with iOS’s low-power mode for conserving battery life, the low-power mode (LPM) in this research allows chips responsible for near-field communication, ultra wideband, and Bluetooth to run in a special mode that can remain on for 24 hours after a device is turned off.

The research is fascinating, but the attack isn’t really feasible. It requires a jailbroken phone, which is hard to pull off in an adversarial setting.

Slashdot thread.

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Andrew Elliot from DCMS provides an update on government initiatives to boost cybersecurity talent pipeline

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This blog was written by an independent guest blogger.

Despite years of industry efforts to combat insider threats, malicious behavior can still sometimes be difficult to identify. As organizations work towards building a corporate cyber security culture, many have begun looking into zero-trust architectures to cover as many attack surfaces as possible.

This action is a step in the right direction, but it also has the potential to raise fears and generate negative responses from employees. Zero-trust security could instill demotivation and resentment if taken as a sign of poor faith and mistrust, accelerating turnover rates and bringing the Great Resignation to a peak. 

How can an organization effectively navigate zero-trust without creating friction among employers and employees? In addition, how can they get there without holding trust-building exercises as part of an in-office environment?

Why trust matters in modern business environments

The security perimeter is no longer a physical location in a modern enterprise; it is a set of access points dispersed in and delivered from the cloud. In addition to identity, the authorization model should factor in the sensitivity of the data, the source location of the request, reliability of the endpoint, etc. The use of multiple cloud platforms and a growing number of endpoints can massively expand the attack surface.

The foundation of zero-trust security starts by eliminating the word trust. Criminals today don’t break into network perimeters; they log in with stolen credentials and then move laterally across the network, hunting for more valuable data. Protecting the path from identity to data is crucial – this is at the heart of an ID-centric zero-trust architecture. To do so, security teams should:

Validate the user
Verify the device
Limit access and privilege

The layers that connect identity to data play essential roles in sharing context and supporting policy enforcement. A zero-trust architecture is continuously aware of identity and monitors for a change in context.

A new memorandum by the United States Government Office of Management and Budget (OBM) outlines why zero-trust architecture is crucial to securing web applications that are relied on daily. The SolarWinds attack reminds us that supply chain security is vital, and the recent Log4Shell incident also highlights how crucial effective incident response is, so finding a way to an improved security posture is imperative.

However, zero-trust does not mean encouraging mistrust through the organization’s networks, and companies should not have to rely on technologies alone for protection. When it is a team effort, security is best applied, and successful zero-trust depends on a culture of transparency, consistency, and communication across the whole organization. But how can organizations achieve this?

The two pillars of building (Zero) Trust

When building zero-trust in any organization, two key pillars must be considered – culture and tools.

As companies begin implementing zero-trust, they must also integrate it into their culture. Inform employees what’s going on, what the process of zero-trust entails, how it impacts and benefits them and the company, and how they can support the zero-trust process. By engaging employees and challenging them to embrace skepticism towards potential threats, businesses are planting the seeds of security across their organizational ecosystem. Once employees understand the value of zero-trust, they also feel trusted and empowered to be part of the broader cybersecurity strategy.

Once zero-trust has been implemented at the core of an organization’s cybersecurity culture, the next step is to apply best practices to implement zero-trust. There are several measures that organizations can take, including:

Use strong authentication to control access.
Elevate authentication.
Incorporate password-less authentication.
(Micro)segment corporate network.
Secure all devices.
Segment your applications.
Define roles and access controls.

Although Zero-Trust is technology agnostic, it is deeply rooted in verifying identities. One of the first steps is identifying the network’s most critical and valuable data, applications, assets, and services. This step will help prioritize where to start and enable zero-trust security policies to be created. If the most critical assets can be identified, organizations can focus their efforts on prioritizing and protecting those assets as part of their zero-trust journey.

The use of multi-factor authentication is crucial here. It is not a case of if to use it, but when. Phishing-resistant MFA can’t be compromised even by a sophisticated phishing attack, which means the MFA solution cannot have anything that can be used as a credential by someone who stole it. This includes one-time passwords, security questions, and imperceptible push notifications.

The challenge of implementing zero-trust

One essential problem that most enterprises are dealing with is the issue of fragmented IAM. As a result, zero-trust implementation is fraught with high complexity, risks, and costs.

The key reason behind this problem is that organizations are operating multiple identity security silos. In fact, the Thales 2021 Access Management Index report indicates that 33% of the surveyed organizations have deployed three or more IAM tools. Coordinating that many systems can, at a minimum, create operational complexity, but it can also increase the risk of fragmented security policies, siloed views of user activity, and siloed containment.

A zero-trust culture should help enterprises with IAM silos to move towards a standardized zero-trust security model, with standardized security policies and adjustments orchestrated from a central control panel across underlying silos. The process should provide insights on security policy gaps and inconsistencies and recommend security policy adjustments based on zero-trust security principles.

Conclusion

A zero-trust approach to security is to cover all attack surfaces and protect organizations, but they mean nothing without people using them appropriately. Aligning company success and security with employee success and security is crucial. Deploying a centralized IAM solution that covers all attack surfaces ensures optimal protection and helps build confidence in a zero-trust business and computing environment.

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