The Relationship Between Network Security And Remote Operation
With the global spread of novel coronavirus in the form of FANDEMIC in 2020 and 2021, the employment market was greatly impacted, and the unemployed soared to the highest value. According to statistics, “the unemployment rate has reached an unprecedented highest level. This is unprecedented since data collection began in 1948. The unemployment rate reached 14.8% in April 2020, and then fell to a higher level(6.7%) in December”(CRS • 2021). This is the result of a special health guide that recommends keeping social distance and advising enterprises to let employees work at home. This is a sudden change for many enterprises, because remote office is likely to be a sudden change in business operations. Companies are rapidly developing solutions that can perform remote tasks across global IT departments. The challenge for IT professionals is to implement new policies and software so that all employees can work remotely while maintaining efficiency. From mid March 2020, a two-week period is a nightmare for many IT workers. The following table shows the sudden increase in telework among American citizens.
As can be seen from the above, the proportion of American citizens working remotely has tripled in a short time. IT staff can respond quickly to business requirements, but the time required to implement new strategies or software is very short. Therefore, IT professionals can ignore some network security issues from the beginning and use new system tasks instead. As a result, employees do not receive proper training on remote operation risks, and costs may accumulate. This document provides an in-depth introduction to the relationship between remote operation and network security, potential pitfalls of network security in remote operation, how network security is applied to remote operation, and VPN tunnel splitting information.
When it comes to network security, the implementation of teleworking policy has become a priority in the past year. Because attackers and hackers see the opportunity to take advantage of remote work to pose threats. The network security of remote operation will be a big challenge in 2020 and will continue in the predictable future. As for the percentage of vulnerabilities, “we can see that from the sharp increase of phishing attempts last year, the use of novel coronavirus and the network threat of election as phishing bait, the malware activity increased by 128% in the third quarter of 2020, and the botnet traffic increased by 29% in the second quarter of 2020″(Ails, 2021). This intrusion trend will only strengthen the view that remote workers and systems will continue to be the targets of attackers. This means that network security experts should focus on educating workers who do not understand the potential dangers of social engineering. A common trend among recent attackers is to exploit the fear of remote workers in this uncertain era. An example of this is when attackers call or email victims in the preamble, saying they represent health organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control. Attackers try to attack employees’ home phones, mobile phones, SMS, email and other communication tools, and damage the company’s infrastructure. Now is the time for all employees, especially network security experts, to adapt to the new situation. They must be prepared to face new risks brought about by sudden changes in the working environment in the new year.
Remote operations can cause attackers to reuse existing threats while creating new problems. For example, in the last section, phishing and social engineering were introduced when discussing the potential ways of hackers. Although this attack method is not new, the attacker can feel new because he has chosen the attack time. Over time, people have found new problems, including home network security, especially insufficient security. Although the workers seem to be trying to work remotely, the wrong layout of the home is not good when starting work. In addition, employees can also import devices into public locations and connect them to insecure public networks, failing to protect data from malicious threats. Another pitfall might include mixing personal and business data on an employee’s home machine. Network security experts cannot use them locally, so it is difficult to update all systems used by the business. Another major pitfall of remote operations is to inform employees of the obvious risks of remote and local operations. For example, the network security of the office may be much stronger than that of the home network, which can prevent malicious attacks on sensitive data. These are not all potential risks to network security in remote operations, but IT personnel must know what common pitfalls might look like.
In order to effectively protect company data, network security experts must make colleagues aware of the risks of remote operation. What IT personnel need to do is to ask all people working at home to build and configure the same home network equipment. In other words, you must formulate instructions and instructions that can be set appropriately in remote operation as soon as possible. This may include WPA settings, rules for devices on the same network, and changing router and firewall settings in preferences. Another good way to work with remote security is to ensure that the company machine being used is properly locked when not in use. This means that employees are not allowed to manage, log in from the company’s equipment or write the password beside the machine. Another option that the IT security team needs to consider is to assign someone to monitor the network for alerts. If this brings too much burden to the team, they should consider outsourcing to a third-party supplier to make up for the lack of support. The IT security team should check the updates of all equipment on a monthly basis and ask remote workers to do so to reduce the possibility of vulnerability being exploited. IT security requires that all events, big or small, be recorded to create a timeline of events. The IT security team must disable remote management or WAN/Internet management to prevent remote workers’ computers from using the management UI over the Internet. Finally, as mentioned in the paragraph, the network security of remote workers starts from the understanding of potential risks and ends here. The IT team should be committed to training employees on threats and risks that may arise when working remotely. From 2015 to 2016, the human errors in network security were obviously shown as: “50% of the most serious vulnerabilities last year were due to unexpected human errors, compared with 31% the previous year.”(Evans 2016) IT staff can deploy the most impressive policies and security policies to protect data, but data is often lost due to insufficient preparation of remote staff.
Considering remote operation, VPN is necessary and absolutely necessary. VPN provides a controlled and secure path for the organization to send and receive data. It also allows remote connection to the enterprise PC for troubleshooting. An interesting topic in the VPN field is whether split tunnels should be used. VPN isolated tunnel is a concept that uses VPN in the environment, but controls which devices are connected to use private connections. This means that, by default, users can use VPN to connect, but does not include websites or applications on the Internet such as YouTube. The biggest advantage of using VPN is that enterprises can reduce the cost of using VPN bandwidth. If employees always use VPN connections and eventually consume company bandwidth through streaming, downloading or other means, the cost is obvious. However, with the reduction of these costs, the use of split tunnels also brings risks. The main problem with tunnel segmentation is that end users can bypass the devices used to track Internet usage(Jeffery 2020). As a result, if hackers can destroy the family environment using split tunnels, this may put the entire company in danger, and the network security department will not see what is happening. Risks include users looking for ways to avoid data loss and bypass intrusion detection systems. Ultimately, the network security team must weigh business options. If a company has a budget to provide unlimited VPN bandwidth for multiple users, there is no need to implement split tunnels. However, if an enterprise does not have this luxury, they may have to take the risk of network security to split Donnell and realize remote work.
I hope this article can provide practical insights for network security experts. It seems that remote operation is not needed now, but more enterprises may need remote operation. Network security experts should be alert to the best practices for implementing remote operations, the challenges faced by network security, the relationship between network security and remote operations, and the separation of tunnel roles in VPN and remote operations.