Multitudes of people are telecommuting because of the coronavirus pandemic, with everyone from Facebook, Google and Apple to JPMorgan Chase to the federal government sending employees out of the office and into workstations — often hastily assembled — at their own homes.
Cisco, the computer networking giant and maker of Webex videoconferencing software, says more than 30% of its biggest global enterprise customers have asked the company to help them ramp up remote work, either by increasing access to Webex or bumping up the number of actual meetings. The San Jose company is seeing "unprecedented increases" in time spent in Webex meetings in Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
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But the profound shift comes with challenges, and a critical one is security. Protocol spoke with Wendy Nather, head of advisory CISOs at Duo Security, a division of Cisco, asking what companies should be thinking about to make sure their employees are protecting themselves and their employers. She talked about new normals and MFAs — and a great application for an Angry Birds Band-Aid.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
People are using Webex for meetings. What other ways are they using videoconferencing?
I've seen it used for keeping communication channels open between people who are either in different parts of the same building or in different buildings. During the day they need to be able to exchange a couple of words like, "Oh, do you see that?" They're kind of virtually sitting together working on something, but it's not a short-term meeting with a beginning and an end. It's co-working by telepresence. And then there are a lot of people who are using telepresence to work on something together, like building a diagram or working on a document.
What do you recommend companies watch for with so many employees working from home, especially if the employees have never done this — or if it's been sort of a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing?
One of the most important things is a lot of enterprises will think of this as an aberration — you know, a temporary condition and everything will go back to normal afterward. This will just be a couple of weeks, or maybe a month, then everybody will go back into the office. They may be tempted to take shortcuts in setting up remote access for their users and thinking, "Well, we're just going to throw this up there, and it'll be OK because it's only for a month."
For example, going without multifactor authentication. Setting up something like a remote desktop protocol and just relying on usernames and passwords is very dangerous because attackers are always scanning the networks for these types of programs. A username and password is not going to keep them out. And so MFA is very, very important.
The other thing is we have to be realistic in that a lot of users may get used to working this way. Or the pandemic may last longer than we think it will. It may become a cyclical thing. And so it's better for enterprises to plan as though this is going to be the new normal. They should start thinking about wanting to support this long term.
What should employees who are working from home be watching out for?
The first thing they absolutely need, if they are going to be using videoconferencing and they haven't really done this before, is a webcam cover. It can be one of these little plastic covers that vendors give out as swag. Or I will tell you that a Band-Aid works perfectly well. I have used an Angry Birds Band-Aid as a webcam cover on a personal laptop for like three years. It doesn't have to be an expensive solution. The camera can turn on when you don't expect it. Or you may have left the camera cover open from your last meeting. You could have family members walking around behind you in their pajamas. So get a webcam cover and use it all the time.
Another thing — and employees should check with their enterprises — is that working from home, especially in the case of this pandemic, means working from home. It does not mean going to Starbucks and hanging around people who might transmit the virus. And if it is all right for employees to be working from another location, they should make sure not to do sensitive operations from unsecured Wi-Fi.
Once they have their work equipment at home, employees get tempted to start using it for all sorts of personal purposes. I'm sure employers will want me to say you should not be surfing inappropriate sites. Or going to any kind of clickbait sites that you wouldn't be going to from work. That's how you can end up downloading malware.
What about phishing risks?
Phishing risks are going to be very similar to what they would have seen in the office. Of course, if somebody calls them at home and claims to be from the help desk, they should hang up and call the help desk back. In other words, you know, the rules should be that, no matter what's going on and where you are, don't give sensitive information to anyone who calls you first.
Are most companies requiring that people working from home be logged in to VPNs?
I don't know, but we certainly know that enterprises are using VPNs and secure non-VPN solutions based on need. For example, if you're a privileged user or if you're a system administrator working from home, you may need to use the VPN to get access to all sorts of systems. You can't necessarily predict ahead of time because you might have to fix anything. But if you were a third-party partner or you're an employee who only needs access to one internal application, then it's entirely possible that the enterprise will want to lock it down.
With Duo, we make that possible without a VPN. So the enterprise needs to decide what kind of access they want each employee to have. Not that everybody comes in on a free-for-all on VPN and can get free rein everywhere. That's where breaches can happen. If companies are following the zero-trust model, they're checking even when people are inside the building and on the corporate network.
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Can you explain the zero-trust model?
The idea has been around for a really long time, at least 20 years. It's no longer safe to assume things are secure inside a firewall. Assume enterprise assets are unprotected and you need to protect them appropriately as if they were in the Wild West. Check it early and often. It's not just checking to see IP address, it's checking the user, and it's where MFA comes in. Check security of a device to see if it's been compromised. Use practices like least privilege — don't give anybody access to anything they don't need. Or segmentation: Just because two things are on a network doesn't mean they need to talk with each other. Duo and Cisco's suite of products will help you achieve that. There are lots of vendors out there addressing different parts. Zero trust is a way of thinking, not a single product.
Should employees expect their employers to keep closer tabs on them online when they work from home?
Fundamentally that is a business question, not a security question. When I was a CISO [in finance and in education], I would have to have those discussions with businesses and say, "Look, you know, you're in charge of making sure that the employees are working however you want them to work." We're protecting the enterprise against attacks. So those are very different things.
I understand. Interesting that you put it that way.
The security group is not the good-taste police, either. If HR wants to monitor what users are doing, that's fine and that's their thing, but that is not something the security team generally has time to do or even wants to do, because they don't want to be the arbiters of good taste.
