Are your remote workers putting your business at risk?

How secure are your remote worker's internet connections?

How often do your staff work remotely? How secure is their internet connection?

In light of an article in computer weekly recently, more than half of UK businesses fear their mobile workers have been hacked and most are concerned a growing mobile workforce is equating to an increased cyber security risk to their business.

To what degree of attention have your remote workers paid to the security of their remote devices?

• Have they hardened their web browsers?
• Have they sandboxed their email clients?
• Are they using Open VPN's?
• How secure is their home internet network?

One way they could negate threats is to effectively isolate their internet network with a number of VLAN's implemented for different devices attributed with varied degrees of trust.

What is 'Network Isolation'?

Network Isolation is physically or logically putting devices on separate networks and restricting how or if devices can communicate with each other.

You might ask yourself 'what threats may justify the need for network isolation?'

Well... if an attacker or malware manages to take hold of your network via your end-user environment, they can attempt to propagate an attack on you entire network infrastructure by attacking the other devices.

Network isolation will help mitigate this attack.

Things to consider in relation to network isolation – do you have untrusted devices on your network?

Maybe you have guests on your network. Maybe you have employees who are not as conscious about security as you are. Their devices may be infected. Perhaps a guest on their network is an adversary.

Would compartmentalising a remote worker's home network help protect your business?

• How sure are you that every device on your network can be trusted?
• Have all your remote worker's devices received all their patch updates?
• Can you categorically confirm every remote device on your network is not vulnerable to an exploit?
• Do you know if any remote devices on your network have been back-doored?

Untrusted devices can be used to propagate attacks.

However, it can be an administrative burden to ensure all of the above have been attended to. Therefore, you have to balance whether or not you think your IT team have the technical capabilities to configure network isolation correctly.

To discuss how effectively our level 2 and level 3 engineers can configure effective network isolation, mitigate threats to your end-user environment and reduce the risks, please contact us.

[Reference: Nathan House, Station X Ltd]