As businesses emerge from the pandemic, many are making strategic decisions about their long-term work arrangements. While there is a substantial debate about remaining remote or bringing people back to the office, many companies are choosing to meet in the middle, embracing a hybrid work arrangement that allows people to work both on-site and remotely.
Over the last year and a half, we all went through the monumental disruption of having just about everyone work from remote locations. We strained VPN infrastructure and out of necessity split tunnels became the norm, not the exception. Even if it meant the users were a bit more exposed, you really had no choice, as Zoom/Webex/Teams meetings can eat up bandwidth like nobody’s business. But now the users are starting to come back into the office, what’s the big deal?
From healthcare to education to critical infrastructure, nobody seems to be safe from cyber attacks. Not even video game creators. News broke in early June that video game giant Electronic Arts was one of the latest victims of a major breach. At first glance, this is just another story of hackers breaking into a victim and finding their way to a sizable pay day. Nothing new here. Plenty of attacks happen every week, right? However it was the way that the attackers got in that was interesting.
When it comes to Data protection, we used to talk about securing the perimeter with firewalls, VPNs, cybersecurity training for employees, to prevent data leaks - remember those days?? Well, these days, things are a little different as we now have remote working to contend with. As a result, Zero Trust has crept in and tilted the formula for Data security and securing network perimeters is no longer effective.
Last year was a tough one for schools, local, and state governments. Not simply because of COVID-19, which forced every local government and school to navigate a pandemic, but also because the pandemic brought with it a different set of dangers. While local governments and schools were trying to figure out remote learning, remote work, and how to run public meetings safely and effectively online, cybercriminals took advantage of the fact that the remote world is new to most small governments.
The exploitation of traditional remote access technologies is reaching new records. That, in a nutshell, is the main finding of Nuspire’s Threat Landscape Report Q1 2021. The report, sourced from 90 billion traffic logs during Q1 2021, looks at a range of events such as malware activity, botnet activity, exploitation activity, and remote access. The remote access section probably best illustrates the risks posed by the sudden shift to remote working.
