Today’s working landscape has changed dramatically. The increase in remote work from homes, cafes and shared workspaces has accelerated during the current pandemic, to an extensive work-from-home model. This change has not only been leveraged by enterprises and their employees, but also by attackers in order to compromise your enterprise network.
A recent article on ThreatPost explained how remote work has given attackers an opportunity to get creative with network breaches. In many cases, they are not even attacking the employee’s laptop directly. Attacks can be conducted via other (unmanaged) devices and IoT that are connected to the same home network to which employees are connecting their laptops.
The article also reported that remote attacks, most taking the form of phishing attacks with malicious payloads such as ransomware, viruses, and remote access trojans, increased 131% in March compared to the same period last year. However, at the same time, enterprises have also experienced a drop in traditional cyberattacks such as botnets, IPS-based triggers and more.
Bottom line – Working remotely has lifted many boundaries that once existed when employees worked solely from the office, and many current security tools and processes do not fully accommodate for this change. Cybercriminals have adjusted their attack strategies, leveraging remote connections, and therefore enterprises should adjust their IT asset security processes.
Securing all your organization’s assets for remote working
To ensure your assets are secure and, in turn, maintain business continuity while remote working, both preventative measures and rapid response are needed. As remote workers use both corporate and personal devices and access the enterprise network via VPN and Zero-Trust Network Access, user identity authentication alone is not enough. Security begins with an accurate picture of your asset inventory – no matter the asset, or its location – along with the ability to manage those assets remotely in real time. Then, endpoint posture verification is essential to preventing remote attacks to ensure the endpoint has the right level of security prior to connecting to your enterprise’s local or cloud networks.
Infinipoint takes asset management to the next level with visibility of 100% of your assets – whether traditional endpoints, IoT, cloud workloads, VM, or software; on or off-premise – and enables you to query and control them in real time as opposed to at a point in time. It gives you an up-to date and continuous picture of your asset security posture and enables you to check asset compliance with enterprise policy and industry standards. To keep your assets compliant and up-to-date, Infinipoint enables you to remotely query or update assets at scale and remediate risks and vulnerabilities immediately, no matter the number of off-premise devices.
In order to protect your assets while employees work from home, you must be able to see and manage them remotely, have visibility into the current security posture of your organization’s assets, and enforce compliance standards – for all assets, everywhere.
