Securing the home worker

A recent study of 1000 teleworkers in 10 countries, commissioned by Cisco, showed that one in five allows friends, family and others to use their work PC to access the Internet. Now is the time to pull stray remote workers back into the security fold. The Cisco survey exposed further horrors: 25% of remote workers said they open unknown emails when using work devices – although the majority claimed to be ‘cognisant’ of security issues when teleworking, they admitted behaviour that totally contradicted the assertion. Loose security habits of remote workers can be devastating. A laptop infected at home can bring down all the PCs on the network when re-connected, and can take days to recover from. We explore the problems of securing remote workers from two angles, in separate articles: the ‘people’ side, and the technical side. For the latter, VPNs are not always the best option to provide remote access capabilities: they may be creating unintentional back doors into the corporate network for hackers. Most people owning a home PC also use it for work. Also, the majority of companies now have part of their staff working from home on a regular basis. Security awareness amongst these remote workers is often worryingly low.