By Sarosh Bana
What initially sounded cliched – that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed almost every aspect of the way we live and work – is now ringing loud and true.
As the world braces for an era of transformed workplaces and lifestyles, organisations confront new challenges as they are compelled to shift to telework practically overnight, with their employees asked to operate from home.
In normal course, transferring entire workforces from offices with secure IT environments to remote setups with scant cybersecurity would require long-term IT planning and preparation. That was, however, not an option in 2020, and cyber criminals have been capitalising on the resultant opportunities.
Fortinet, the Sunnyvale-headquartered cybersecurity major that addresses the most critical security challenges and protects data across the entire digital infrastructure, has investigated the cybersecurity challenges that organisations are facing under the circumstances and has published its study titled 2020 Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report.
Based on a survey conducted in June, involving participants employed across 17 countries and representing both private and public sector industries, Fortinet determined that almost 60 per cent of enterprises are planning to invest more than $250,000 on secure telework over the next two years due to the pandemic. These investments were unplanned, but securing remote work has become a top priority for these companies.
Besides, nearly half of the respondents have already invested in virtual private network (VPN) and cloud security, and are planning to upgrade network access control (NAC) and endpoint detection and response (EDR). The top areas they are planning to make new investments in, as part of their business continuity plan, are multi-factor authentication (MFA), secure telephony/unified communications, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) for the enterprise as well as for the employee’s home, segmentation, VPN, and secure access service edge (SASE).
Nearly two-thirds of firms surveyed needed to transition more than half of their workforces to telework, even as they anticipate more of their workforce to continue to work remotely in future. Because of security issues encountered during the pandemic, 43 per cent of those surveyed are looking to change their security vendors, while only 23 per cent are planning on drawing down their vendors.
The report notes that COVID-19 will have lasting results on secure telework and how organisations invest in security. “Given the high numbers of both attempted and successful breaches, IT decision-makers need to carefully consider what technologies and approaches are needed to secure telework,” it maintains. “Many firms are focusing on the obvious areas, like VPN, cloud security, and skilled IT security personnel, but there are other key areas as well that should be given more attention to effectively shore up network security.”
Fortinet believes that organisations will be best prepared for sustained periods of telework by taking a SASE approach with secure SD-WAN. Moreover, while using VPNs is necessary, it does not address the inherent insecurity of simple username/password logins, with MFA required to access critical information and applications. This would eliminate the risk from stolen or weak passwords, preventing hackers from validating credentials and infiltrating the networks.
During his recent India visit, Derek Manky, who is the Chief of Security Insights & Global Threat Alliances at Fortinet’s Office of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), said that though organisations have completed the initial phase of transitioning their entire workforce to remote telework, CISOs face new challenges in maintaining secure teleworker business models. There has been a significant spike in COVID-19 related threats, with cybercriminals unleashing a surprisingly high volume of new threats to take advantage of inadvertent security gaps as organisations scurry to ensure business continuity.
“An unprecedented number of unprotected users and devices are now online, with one or two people in every home connecting remotely to work through the internet,” mentions Manky. “Simultaneously there are children at home engaged in remote learning and the entire family is engaged in multi-player games, chatting with friends as well as streaming music and video.” All this has provoked a surge in phishing attacks, with an average of about 600 new phishing campaigns every day, the content designed to either prey on the fears and concerns of individuals or pretend to provide essential information on the current pandemic.
The phishing attacks range from scams related to helping individuals deposit their stimulus for COVID-19 tests, to providing access to Chloroquine and other medicines or medical devices, to providing helpdesk support for new teleworkers. Some phishing attacks even target children, with offers of online games and free movies, or even access to credit cards to buy online games or shop online.
However, the end goal of these phishing attacks is to steal personal information or even target businesses through teleworkers. Most of them contain malicious payloads that include ransomware, viruses, remote access trojans (RATs) designed to provide criminals with remote access to endpoint systems, and even remote desktop protocol (RDP) exploits. The first quarter of 2020 has documented a 17 per cent increase in viruses for January, a 52 per cent increase for February and an alarming 131 per cent increase for March compared to the same period in 2019. The significant rise in viruses is mainly attributed to malicious phishing attachments. Multiple sites that are illegally streaming movies that were still in theatres secretly infect malware to anyone who logs on.
According to Manky, as users are all connected to the home network, attackers have multiple avenues of attack that can be exploited targeting devices, including computers, tablets, gaming and entertainment systems and even online IoT devices such as digital cameras and smart appliances, with the ultimate goal of finding a way back into a corporate network and its valuable digital resources. “If the device of a remote worker can be compromised, it can become a conduit back into the organisation’s core network, enabling the spread of malware to other remote workers,” he explains. “The resulting business disruption can be just as effective as ransomware targeting internal network systems for taking a business offline.”
Manky recommends adopting the same strategy for cyber viruses that we are adopting in the real world today, with cyber social distancing all about recognising risks and maintaining distance. “Isolation is all about segmenting networks and quarantining the malware from spreading across the network,” he points out.
