Security Tips When Working From Home
Currently and going forward, many employees may find themselves working from home temporarily or permanently. Security is still extremely important to yourself and your employer and today, we will explore tips and tricks that will help you maintain your security posture while working remotely.
Working From Home Security Tips & Tricks
- Leverage a VPN – Hopefully your employer has provided a VPN solution for you to connect to your organization’s network. You should always try and connect to your VPN when you are at home, in a coffee shop, or anywhere outside of your office, as this provides an encrypted “tunnel” between your device and the internal, corporate network.
- Set-up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – MFA is using a combination of different methods to prove you are who you say you are, when authenticating to an application or system. This helps protect your accounts from being hacked by ensuring that, not only is a password needed to login to your account, but also something additional such as a code texted to your phone. This recommendation applies to the applications you are logging into for work and your personal accounts, such as banking, retirement accounts, email, etc.
- Lock your workstation – This may seem silly to do while working from home, but getting in the habit of locking your workstation anytime you walk away helps building muscle memory. And if you don’t lock your workstation when you get back into the office or you go to a coffee shop to work, you may leave your device susceptible to compromise, as bad things can happen to unattended workstations very quickly. Additionally, locking your workstation at home can prevent silly accidents, like bumping into your keyboard or a rogue child that gets into your office, from causing any havoc to your workstation.
- Setup a Password Manager – Password managers store all of your passwords securely and allow you to focus on only remembering 1 password for your vault, as opposed to memorizing hundreds of different passwords for all your accounts. Here is how it works: you set 1 really strong password to get into your ‘vault’ which then stores the rest of your passwords to other sites. Something such as LastPass can be setup for free, helping improve your security and reduce your stress levels associated with trying to remember all your different passwords. Again, something we recommend for both work and personal use.
While working from home can bring a separate set of stressors, hopefully by implementing these tips and tricks, security is not one of them! Have any additional tips that you use to help improve your security while working from home? Let us know and we would be happy to share. @TriaxiomSec or Contact Us
