Security News > 2020 > October > COVID-19 security tips: Ensure you sack your staff without leaving their IT access enabled, says Secureworks

Or so says Secureworks, which throughout 2020 has, perhaps counterintuitively, insisted there has been minimal uptick in cyber activity from malicious people, stating in its research The Effect of COVID-19 on Incident Response that "Data on confirmed security incidents and genuine threats to customers showed the threat level largely unchanged from before the pandemic."

Rather, reckons the company, the near-overnight shift to remote working triggered by the pandemic has created a whole set of poorly understood IT infrastructures lashed together in a hurry and therefore containing large numbers of hidden vulnerabilities - vulns that infosec bods ought to be hunting down, in Secureworks' view.

Barry Hensley, Secureworks' chief threat intelligence officer, said in a canned statement: "Against a continuing threat of enterprise-wide disruption from ransomware, business email compromise and nation-state intrusions, security teams have faced growing challenges including increasingly dispersed workforces, issues arising from the rapid implementation of remote working with insufficient consideration to security implications, and the inevitable reduced focus on security from businesses adjusting to a changing world."

Secureworks' recommendations for securing a remote IT estate will sound wearily familiar: enable MFA; secure remote access methods; and enforce secure access controls to cloud services.

More offbeat are its other suggestions, which include strengthening "Remote termination processes" to ensure emotional ex-staffers can't go on the rampage after you sack them over Zoom, and making thorough plans for remote incident response - including how to quickly kill shared folder synchronisation and identifying key process or personnel bottlenecks that will need bypassing in case of ransomware, or worse.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/15/secureworks_report/