#workingfromhome will reduce your Coronavirus risk, but it potentially increases risk of another type of virus!

Well, not so much a virus as a potential cyber security incident (They’re kinda the same though, right?), but I’m not here to split hairs.

In the rush to enable our capability to work from home, I have seen plenty of knee-jerk reactions to enabling remote access, most of which overlooked basic cyber security principles.

Thankfully, the opportunity to correct this will never go away, so you might as well get in early before an incident occurs.

Here are the bare minimums we suggest you have in place;

1. Use a Password Manager
2. A VPN connection back to your network (Keep connections encrypted)
3. Two-factor Authentication (For everything)
4. Commercial grade managed anti-virus software (On every device)
5. Block Remote Desktop to external connections (Except over VPN)
6. Constant user education and reminders

There is of course plenty more you can do, but this should be a minimum.

Links referenced in the video for more information;

Australian Cyber Security Centre: https://www.cyber.gov.au/

Feel free to reach out to either myself or the ServiceScaler team for more information or clarification on anything mentioned in the video, we’re always available to help!

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everyone, Rob here from ServiceScaler In today’s video, I’d like to tell you about how you can help protect your network with everybody working from home With everybody working from home, we’ve created an exponential number of penetration points, or attack vectors, in which malicious activity can be undertaken against our network. Now there are a few basic things that we can put in place to protect ourselves and protect our information and our data from malicious attack. The most important at the moment, I think, is two-factor authentication. Now two-factor authentication is using a second factor or second form of authentication to validate our identity. The first will be a password. Now passwords can be easily hacked, lost, forgotten or stolen, and can be used to access your network. Now with the increase in number of people connecting to the network remotely, that risk increases exponentially. So to overcome that we can use two-factor or multi-factor authentication. Multi-factor authentication can be done by having simply an app on your phone that every time you try and authenticate using your password. It will send you a notification to validate that it is you who is trying to connect to the network. We suggest deploying this over the top of a VPN, virtual private network, to connect back to your network, which will encrypt the data and have two factor authentication to validate the identity of the person trying to connect over that network. If you’d like to learn more about two-factor authentication or the importance of two-factor authentication, i’ve got a link in the post above that will take you across to our two-factor authentication page so you can understand a little bit more about how it works. There’s also a link to the Australian Cyber Security Center who has outlined the risks around the coronavirus scams that are happening right now and the importance of having two factor authentication in place. And of course if you have any questions, you’re welcome to DM me, call me or email me, contact information in my profile. Cheers.