Secure Your Work-from-Home VPN Connections
With COVID-19 being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), government-mandated quarantines and self-imposed social distancing are now becoming widespread occurrences in over 100 countries.
In this environment, many organizations now rely on work-from-home for many of their employees. These remote workers rely on VPNs in order to connect to their companies’ network. However, a misconfigured network connection can be a cybersecurity vulnerability to your organization, becoming a point of attack for attackers to exploit.
What are VPN Connections?
A VPN, or a virtual private network, acts as a digital tunnel that allows a remote worker to securely connect to a local network at your office. Using a VPN, data that is sent over the internet from the remote computer is encrypted until it is captured by the connected network. Encrypted data is protected from cyberattackers by scrambling information into an unreadable format.
Like any online connection, no VPN is completely impervious to attack. Different vendors and their VPN products have different levels of security. Furhermore, every company’s VPN requirements are different – While some companies may need large numbers 1000+ of VPN connections, others only need a few. It is important to select the product that is most appropriate to your organization.
Cyberattackers are constantly trying to identify new security vulnerabilities in VPN code. When a new vulnerability is discovered, a fix is developed by cybersecurity professionals, and it is rolled out to the public through a software patch. For example, in April of last year the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security notified Canadian companies that there were vulnerabilities in the VPN software from Fortinet, Palo Alto GlobalProtect, Pulse Connect Secure, and more. Neglecting to apply these patches to your computer will lead to your VPN being susceptible to known vulnerabilities.
Another step that you can take to secure your VPN connections is by using Multifactor authentication. This is the practice of adding a ‘second authentication’ method to ensure that attackers who have your password still cannot access your account. This is done by requiring logins from unfamiliar logins to use an additional key, either through a code or a token.
GIGE IT Solutions helps you organization set up secure VPN connections to help you protect your sensitive data. We help you choose the most appropriate solution for your company’s specific needs, and help you monitor, identify, and rectify security flaws that pose a threat to you. Call us at +1 888 366 4443 or email us at info@gige.ca to get started today.