Secure Remote Access: Keeping Employees and the Organization Safe
Published May 19, 2020 WRITTEN BY ED TITTEL. Ed Tittel is a long-time IT industry writer and consultant who specializes in matters of networking, security, and Web technologies. For a copy of his resume, a list of publications, his personal blog, and more, please visit www.edtittel.com or follow @EdTittel In this age of lockdowns, social distancing and working from home, organizations must think carefully about how to extend their networks and services across the internet and into employees’ and contractors’ homes. This makes remote access security management both a timely and an imperative topic, because it has become the norm for many companies and organizations this year. If we are to believe even the most optimistic of vaccine deployment scenarios, our pandemic situation is likely to persist for at least another six to nine months. That said, many experts think that working from home is the new normal, so even once it’s safe for us all to be together in an office again, there may be no office to go back to. The old ways of working mostly within a secure organizational perimeter are on the way out, so we need to update our security operations for the new reality. How does remote access work? In the simplest of terms, remote access requires that users employ a remote device of some kind to establish a connection to an organizational service. The connection is a communication link that spans the internet from the client or user side to a server or service inside the firewall. For example, Microsoft includes both an old-line application, Remote Desktop Connection, and a new-style Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, Remote Desktop, in Windows 10. Both use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to establish a remote connection between a client PC (user device) on one side and a host PC or server (server device) on the other side. Thus, the elements of remote access include the following: A remote access client or application that lets the end-user request access to a remote resource of some kind A remote connection that connects the end-user to the resource, and vice versa A remote host or service to which an end-user can connect, and from which they can request information, services, resources and so forth Securing remote access means securing all elements For a company or organization to meet best security practice requirements for remote access, all elements involved in remote access must be secure. Here’s a checklist of items and capabilities that fall under this large and far-ranging umbrella: Before users obtain remote access, they must be identified and authenticated. The best form of security for identity and authentication nowadays relies on two-factor authentication (2FA) or better, where a user’s cellphone serves admirably to provide a separate channel for ID and authentication traffic, as well as providing a tangible token of identity in and of itself. The client software that users employ for remote access should themselves be secure and free from known technical vulnerabilities or susceptibilities to attack through social engineering. Users working remotely need basic security awareness training to keep them from inadvertently disclosing what the organization wants kept confidential – namely, their account and password information, among other sensitive data. The client software must also be scanned for vulnerabilities (preferably at high frequency, if not continuously) […]
