Protecting Remote Workers Against the Perils of Public WI-FI

In a physical office, front-desk security keeps strangers out of work spaces. In your own home, you control who walks through your door. But what happens when your “office” is a table at the local coffee shop, where you’re sipping a latte among total strangers?

Widespread remote work is likely here to stay, even after the pandemic is over. But the resumption of travel and the reopening of public spaces raises new concerns about how to keep remote work secure.

In particular, many employees used to working in the relative safety of an office or private home may be unaware of the risks associated with public Wi-Fi. Just like you can’t be sure who’s sitting next to your employee in a coffee shop or other public space, you can’t be sure whether the public Wi-Fi network they’re connecting to is safe. And the second your employee accidentally connects to a malicious hotspot, they could expose all the sensitive data that’s transmitted in their communications or stored on their device.

Taking scenarios like this into account when planning your cybersecurity protections will help keep your company’s data safe, no matter where employees choose to open their laptops.

The risks of Wi-Fi search

An employee leaving Wi-Fi enabled when they leave their house may seem harmless, but it really leaves them incredibly vulnerable. Wi-Fi enabled devices can reveal the network names (SSIDs) they normally connect to when they are on the move. An attacker can then use this information to emulate a known “trusted” network that is not encrypted and pretend to be that network.  Many devices will automatically connect to these “trusted” open networks without verifying that the network is legitimate.

Often, attackers don’t even need to emulate known networks to entice users to connect. According to a recent poll, two-thirds of people who use public Wi-Fi set their devices to connect automatically to nearby networks, without vetting which ones they’re joining.

If your employee automatically connects to a malicious network — or is tricked into doing so — a cybercriminal can unleash a number of damaging attacks. The network connection can enable the attacker to intercept and modify any unencrypted content that is sent to the employee’s device. That means they can insert malicious payloads into innocuous web pages or other content, enabling them to exploit any software vulnerabilities that may be present on the device.

Once such malicious content is running on a device, many technical attacks are possible against other, more important parts of the device software and operating system. Some of these provide administrative or root level access, which gives the attacker near total control of the device. Once an attacker has this level of access, all data, access, and functionality on the device is potentially compromised. The attacker can remove or alter the data, or encrypt it with ransomware and demand payment in exchange for the key.

The attacker could even use the data to emulate and impersonate the employee who owns and or uses the device. This sort of fraud can have devastating consequences for companies. Last year, a Florida teenager was able to take over multiple high-profile Twitter accounts by impersonating a member of the Twitter IT team.

A multi-layered approach to remote work security

These worst-case scenarios won’t occur every time an employee connects to an unknown network while working remotely outside the home — but it only takes one malicious network connection to create a major security incident. To protect against these problems, make sure you have more than one line of cybersecurity defenses protecting your remote workers against this particular attack vector.

Require VPN use. The best practice for users who need access to non-corporate Wi-Fi is to require that all web traffic on corporate devices go through a trusted VPN. This greatly limits the attack surface of a device, and reduces the probability of a device compromise if it connects to a malicious access point.

Educate employees about risk. Connecting freely to public Wi-Fi is normalized in everyday life, and most people have no idea how risky it is. Simply informing your employees about the risks can have a major impact on behavior. No one wants to be the one responsible for a data breach or hack…[…] Read more »…