Today there is an increasingly mobile workforce. Workers are able to travel and stay connected to the office and many employees are allowed to work remotely for at least some part of the week. While workers are in the office, security is not a problem for IT departments. Workers connect to the internal network, be that a wired or wireless network, and thanks to the protection of the firewall, their devices and the network are protected. The problem comes when workers move outside the protection of that firewall. Here IT departments struggle to ensure the same level of protection.
When workers are travelling for work or are between the home and the office, they often connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots. Connecting to those hotspots introduces risks. While connected, sensitive information could potentially be disclosed which could be intercepted. Malware could also be inadvertently downloaded. When a connection is made to the work network, that malware could easily be transferred.
Connecting to untrusted Wi-Fi networks is a major risk. These could be legitimate Wi-Fi services provided on public transport, in coffee shops, or city-wide Wi-Fi networks. While these networks may be safe, there is no telling who may be connected to that network. These Wi-Fi networks are often not monitored, and cybersecurity protections may be poor.
There are several possible attack scenarios where an individual could perform malicious acts on users of the Wi-Fi network. One of the biggest risks is a man-in-the-middle attack. In this scenario, a Wi-Fi user will be connected to the network and will believe that they are securely accessing the internet, their email, or even the work network, when the reality is that their connection is anything but secure.
A hacker could be listening in and could obtain information from that connection. Through ARP poisoning, a hacker could trick the Wi-Fi gateway and the user’s device into connecting, and traffic would be routed through the hacker’s device where it is intercepted. An attacker could also create an evil twin hotspot. Here a rogue hotspot is created that closely mimics the genuine hotspot. A Wi-Fi user may mistakenly connect to the evil twin thinking they are connected to the legitimate hotspot. Since the evil twin is operated by the attacker, any information disclosed while connected can be intercepted.
Remote workers must be told never to connect to a Wi-Fi network unless they do so through a VPN than encrypts their data. Employees may forget to connect to their VPN, and if weak passwords are used, even if they are encrypted they could be cracked relatively easily, but with a VPN and password policies, risk will be reduced to a reasonable level.
Wi-Fi networks tend not to have the same protections as corporate networks, so there may be little restrictions on the types of website that can be accessed while connected. To protect remote workers, a DNS filter such as WebTitan should be used.
A DNS filter performs content control at the DNS lookup stage when a user attempts to access the internet. When a web address is entered in the browser, the DNS server looks up the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and matches it with the IP address of the website. The browser is provided with the IP address and the server is contacted and the content is downloaded. With a DNS filter, before any content is downloaded, it is subject to certain rules. For instance, category-based filtering could be used to prevent adult content from being accessed. An attempt would be blocked before any content is downloaded. Importantly for security, the DNS filter would prevent the user from visiting any known malicious website. A phishing site for instance or a site known to harbor malware. With a cloud-based DNS filtering service, all filtering takes place in the cloud and there is no latency regardless of where the individual is located. DNS filtering protects workers on corporate networks as well as remote workers.
A further control that is useful is an email filtering solution, such as SpamTitan, that incorporates Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC).
In the event of a user’s email credentials being obtained in a man-in-the-middle attack via a rogue Wi-Fi hotspot, their email account could be accessed by the attacker. Since legitimate credentials are being used, this would not generate any alerts and the attacker could peruse the email account in their own time. If the account is used to send phishing messages, as they often are, DMARC will prevent those messages from being delivered and will alert the company to the issue.
The DMARC element of the spam filter checks the sender’s IP address to make sure it matches the IP on the DNS servers for the sender’s organization to make sure they match. If the IP is not authorized to send messages from that domain, the messages will be rejected or quarantined, and the company would be alerted to the phishing attack. The same is true for spoofing of email addresses.
SpamTitan also includes dual anti-virus engines to identify malware sent via email and sandboxing to help catch previously unknown malware variants that have yet to have their signatures uploaded to AV engines. Any malware sent via email will also be quarantined to keep inboxes free of threats.
If you run a business and allow workers to connect remotely, speak to TitanHQ today to find out more about how you can better protect your remote workers, and your business, from cyberattacks conducted via email and the web.
Our team of highly experienced staff will walk you through the benefits of DNS and spam filtering, can schedule a personalized product demonstration, and will help you get set up for a free trial of SpamTitan and WebTitan. You can then evaluate both solutions in your own environment. Both solutions can be set up and protecting you in a matter of minutes.