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Cybersecurity Tactics for the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Cybersecurity Tactics for the Coronavirus Pandemic Risk Practice Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic The pandemic has made it harder for companies to maintain security and business continuity. But new tactics can help cybersecurity leaders to safeguard their organizations. by Jim Boehm, James Kaplan, Marc Sorel, Nathan Sportsman, and Trevor Steen © Gorodenkoff/Getty Images March 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has presented chief companies eliminate vulnerabilities soon after information security officers (CISOs) and their their discovery. Patches that protect remote teams with two immediate priorities. One is infrastructure deserve particular attention. securing work-from-home arrangements on an unprecedented scale now that organizations have — Scale up multifactor authentication. Employees told employees to stop traveling and gathering, and working remotely should be required to use government officials in many places have advised multifactor authentication (MFA) to access or ordered their people to stay home as much as networks and critical applications. Scaling up possible. The other is maintaining the confidentiality, MFA can be challenging: the protection it will integrity, and availability of consumer-facing add calls for a surge in short-term capacity. network traffic as volumes spike—partly as a result Several practices make the rollout of MFA of the additional time people are spending at home. more manageable. One is to prioritize users who have elevated privileges (such as domain Recent discussions with cybersecurity leaders and sys admins, and application developers) suggest that certain actions are especially helpful and work with critical systems (for instance, to fulfill these two priorities. In this article, we money transfers). Targeting those users in pilot set out the technology modifications, employee- rollouts of modest scale will allow cybersecurity engagement approaches, and process changes that teams to learn from the experience and use cybersecurity leaders have found effective. that knowledge to shape more extensive implementation plans. Cybersecurity teams can also benefit from using MFA technologies, such Securing work-from-home as the application gateways offered by several arrangements at scale cloud providers, that are already integrated with The rapid, widespread adoption of work-from- existing processes. home tools has put considerable strain on security teams, which must safeguard these tools without — Install compensating controls for facility-based making it hard or impossible for employees to work. applications migrated to remote access. Some Conversations with CISOs in Asia, Europe, and applications, such as bank-teller interfaces and North America about how they are securing these cell-center wikis, are available only to users new work-at-home arrangements highlight the working onsite at their organizations’ facilities. changes these executives are making in three areas: To make such facility-based applications technology, people, and processes. available to remote workers, companies must protect those apps with special controls. For Technology: Make sure required controls are example, companies might require employees in place to activate VPNs and use MFA to reach what As companies roll out the technologies that enable would otherwise be facility-based assets employees to work from home and maintain while permitting them to use MFA alone business continuity, cybersecurity teams can take when accessing other parts of the corporate these actions to mitigate cybersecurity risks: environment. — Accelerate patching for critical systems. — Account for shadow IT. At many companies, Shortening patch cycles for systems, such employees use so-called shadow IT systems, as virtual private networks (VPNs), end-point which they set up and administer without formal protection, and cloud interfaces, that are approval or support from the IT department. essential for remote working will help Extended work-from-home operations will 2 Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic expose such systems because business interactions in hallways, break rooms, and other processes that depend on shadow IT in the office settings. office will break down once employees find themselves unable to access those resources. — Focus on what to do rather than what not to IT and security teams should be prepared to do. Telling employees not to use tools (such as transition, support, and protect business-critical consumer web services) they believe they need shadow assets. They should also keep an eye to do their jobs is counterproductive. Instead, out for new shadow-IT systems that employees security teams must explain the benefits, such use or create to ease working from home, to as security and productivity, of using approved compensate for in-office capabilities they can’t messaging, file-transfer, and document- access, or to get around obstacles. management tools to do their jobs. To further encourage safe behavior, security teams can — Quicken device virtualization. Cloud-based promote the use of approved devices—for virtualized desktop solutions can make it easier example, by providing stipends to purchase for staff to work from home because many of approved hardware and software. them can be implemented more quickly than on-premises solutions. Bear in mind that the — Increase awareness of social engineering. new solutions will need strong authentication COVID-19–themed phishing, vishing (voice protocols—for example, a complex password, phishing), and smishing (text phishing) combined with a second authentication factor. campaigns have surged. Security teams must prepare employees to avoid being tricked. These People: Help employees understand the risks teams should not only notify users that attackers Even with stronger technology controls, employees will exploit their fear, stress, and uncertainty but working from home must still exercise good also consider shifting to crisis-specific testing judgment to maintain information security. The themes for phishing, vishing, and smishing added stress many people feel can make them campaigns. more prone to social-engineering attacks. Some employees may notice that their behavior isn’t — Identify and monitor high-risk user groups. monitored as it is in the office and therefore choose Some users, such as those working with to engage in practices that open them to other personally identifiable information or other threats, such as visiting malicious websites that confidential data, pose more risk than others. office networks block. Building a “human firewall” High-risk users should be identified and will help ensure that employees who work from monitored for behavior (such as unusual home do their part to keep the enterprise secure. bandwidth patterns or bulk downloads of enterprise data) that can indicate security — Communicate creatively. A high volume of breaches. crisis-related communications can easily drown out warnings of cybersecurity risks. Security Processes: Promote resilience teams will need to use a mix of approaches to Few business processes are designed to support get their messages across. These might include extensive work from home, so most lack the right setting up two-way communication channels embedded controls. For example, an employee who that let users post and review questions, has never done high-risk remote work and hasn’t set report incidents in real time, and share best up a VPN might find it impossible to do so because practices; posting announcements to pop-up of the in-person VPN-initiation requirements. In or universal-lock screens; and encouraging such cases, complementary security-control the innovative use of existing communication processes can mitigate risks. Such security tools that compensate for the loss of informal processes include these: Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic 3 Even with stronger technology controls, employees working from home must still exercise good judgment to maintain information security. — Supporting secure remote-working tools. particularly for data and end points, is important Security and IT help desks should add capacity for two reasons. First, cyberattacks have while exceptionally large numbers of employees proliferated. Second, basic boundary-protection are installing and setting up basic security tools, mechanisms, such as proxies, web gateways, such as VPNs and MFA. It might be practical to or network intrusion-detection systems (IDS) deploy security-team members temporarily at or intrusion-prevention systems (IPS), won’t call centers to provide added frontline support. secure users working from home, off the enterprise network, and not connected to a VPN. — Testing and adjusting IR and BC/DR capabilities. Depending on the security stack, organizations Even with increased traffic, validating remote that do not require the use of a VPN or require communications and collaboration tools allows it only to access a limited set of resources may companies to support incident-response (IR) go largely unprotected. To expand monitoring, and business-continuity (BC)/disaster-recovery security teams should update security- (DR) plans. But companies might have to adjust information-and-event-management (SIEM) their plans to cover scenarios relevant to the systems with new rule sets and discovered current crisis. To find weak points in your plans, hashes for novel malware. They should also conduct a short IR or BC/DR tabletop exercise increase staffing in the security operations with no one in the office. center (SOC) to help compensate
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