Cyber risks of working from home – Maintaining control over your IT environments

Working from home (WFH) has taken over as the new normal for employees at many organizations. Whether your outlook for extended WFH and social distancing is glass-half-full or half-empty, if you’re in IT, you’ve probably realized it drastically expands the estate you’re responsible for overseeing. Working from home brings numerous cyber risks, including the risks that follow uncontrolled technology applications and usage.

Vulnerable software and third-party apps pose a real cyber risk for IT organizations. Of course, this isn’t a new challenge. What is new is how dispersed the workforce is today, and the opportunity for users to deploy their own apps and software increases when they’re working on personal networks with company hardware.

This is why it’s more important than ever to gain threat visibility and remediate vulnerabilities while hardware is deployed to at-home workers. The challenge for IT is still evergreen: before COVID-19, security teams were overwhelmed. With so many daily threats to the estate, they couldn’t keep up. This resulted in an average of one in 10 patches being deployed, which of course doesn’t catch everything.

But sometimes you don’t need to catch everything—just those that threaten your environments. While organizations are focused heavily on adjusting to the new status quo, hackers are banking on a blind eye being turned to the security of these suddenly mobile and remote enterprises as assets are moved at breakneck speed to support the workforce and maintain productivity.

Many workers who had desktops at the office are now bringing their own devices to the network and spinning up SaaS applications on the fly. What does that mean for exposure? For routers or switches, how do you ensure you’re aware of vulnerabilities affecting these devices?

Maintain control over your sprawled environment with effective software vulnerability assessment and management:

• Gain visibility into all your software and its patch status
• Take advantage of vulnerability intelligence from Secunia Research to prioritize remediation
• Create watchlists for prioritized devices and adapt as those assets change

When times are uncertain, and as hackers attempt to take advantage of the chaos of mobile and remote workforces, know that your organization has a view into the vulnerability landscape and the intelligence to mitigate exposure. Keep your business safe with reliable software vulnerability management.

Learn more about the threat landscape and see how software vulnerability management with Flexera can help.