Border Security to Border-less Security

With the unprecedented move to telecommuting in the last week for many industries, it is critical for security teams to understand that many traditional security measures become difficult for the organization to maintain, thus needing a different mindset.

The idea of maintaining border security on your organization’s central network is changing to the need to maintain the border of each device that is outside of your environment. Basically, we have gone from a form of macro security to micro security.

Here is a familiar checklist that I am using moving forward:

1. Do you know what hardware is being used by your employees to access critical services? Is it organizational or personally owned?
2. Do you know what software they will be using?
3. Do you have some way to conduct and report on a vulnerability assessment of their device?
4. Is the devices administrator accounts being managed correctly? Do you have a policy on how administrative privileges are used?
5. Is the operating system, software, and hardware of their device setup and maintained in a standard secure configuration?
6. What kind of logging are you getting from the device on its current security state?
7. Does the computer have appropriate protections on the mail client and browser? What browser add-ons are allowed? What security features are required?
8. Does the device have appropriate malware protection?
9. What services and network access is allowed on the device? Do you have a standard configuration? Can you check whether the configuration has been modified?
10. Does the device have a process for backup and/or recovery? Do you have the ability to recover the device remotely?
11. Is the host based firewall setup correctly? Do you have a standard & secure configuration?
12. Does the organization have appropriate controls around the critical services to allow remote users to access securely?
13. Is the data on the remote device appropriately encrypted & secured?

Obviously these are the first 13 of the CIS Top 20 Security Controls, applied to individual devices in our environment. However, as our security posture has significantly changed in the last week, I feel they are important to evaluate again, and apply to the current situation.

Good luck everyone, the world has changed around us, but our goals to defend and protect are the same!