Blurring Boundaries

COVID19 caused a significant shift in the number of employees who work remotely full- or part-time. Yet many have been working remotely in some capacity for years prior to the pandemic, even if they were not designated as remote or hybrid in their contracts. With the wide availability of laptops for business use and improved capabilities of smartphones and tablets, 62% of workers aged 22 to 65 claim to work remotely at least occasionally. Many of us tend to “take work home” either by working on laptops outside of business hours, or checking email and messengers like Slack outside the office environment. To do this, we connect to home and offsite networks, relying solely on the security capabilities of our devices to ensure protection away from the corporate enclave.

Although most people are aware of the security risks associated with open Wi-Fi networks, the risks posed by secure Wi-Fi networks tend to be overlooked. Any attacker in the vicinity of an open Wi-Fi network in places such as cafes, hotels, and airports can infiltrate the network and devices connected to it if they possess the Wi-Fi password. In the case of secure Wi-Fi networks in non-open locations, such as our homes, the attack vector shifts to IoT devices like cameras or routers. This way, previously secure work devices are exposed via direct attacks or lateral movement. Untrusted networks create a new, extended attack surface as the boundaries between the office and remote workplace become increasingly blurred.

The current approach to this problem from the corporate security standpoint is the use of endpoint detection and response, as well as virtual private networks. However, endpoint detection can be bypassed or nullified, while VPNs can be compromised, granting unauthorized parties access to sensitive information and corporate assets. Untrusted networks are making these attacks easier to execute without being detected by the SOC staff.

To improve the existing approach, corporate network security policies and controls can be extended into untrusted networks through the use of mobile hardware access points with edge compute capabilities. With a defense-in-depth approach, these access points add key security features to cover the new attack perimeter:

• Private network segmentation
• Prevention of connections via unknown devices
• Connection inspection via IP, DNS, or deep packet inspection

By first creating a private segmented network, the DuskRise solution limits the ease at which attackers can access remote workers’ devices. In the event an attacker attempts to gain access to the corporate network, the connection from an unknown device will be blocked, preventing further access. Finally, the IoT hardware device can also perform connection inspections, securing remote workers’ devices in situations where endpoint security might be compromised.

Want a deeper dive? Schedule a consultation with a DuskRise representative today: https://get.duskrise.com/consultation?hsLang=en