Another challenge is the new home office, where spouses may be working remotely, often alongside their children attending school online. Home networks lack typical protections and bifurcations of the corporate office and may be prone to attacks using lateral movement techniques. In these scenarios, after gaining initial access through an insufficiently protected device, such as a family computer, attackers move deeper into a network, searching for other devices to compromise or obtain increased privileges. This continued probing could eventually lead to the exfiltration of sensitive corporate data or high-value intellectual property.
Employees forced to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic altered their online habits, and to minimize hacking risk they needed cybersecurity tools to keep up. As a result, security administrators face a danger they may not have previously anticipated: attacks from insiders.
Traditional network management approaches of multiple point products, manual change processes, monolithic policies and data silos no longer work. Business, risk, service and security assurance programs all need to be agile, efficient and anticipate future threats and remedies.