Remote working and ransomware

The past few months have turned the world on its head, and it won’t be news to readers of this blog that the universal shift to remote working has radically altered the threat landscape. Among other things, the people responsible for corporate cyberprotection now need to consider two new factors: the geographical distribution of the office network, and the presence of computers used for work in home environments.

Threats in the office network

So, your employees are now working from home, remotely connecting to the corporate network. That essentially means the office network is now distributed throughout the city (maybe more than one). That means if a piece of ransomware infects the network, computers that are miles away from each other may be encrypted.

Even if you have backups of all work computers, you will have to either dispatch technical support to the home of every affected employee, or get the computers to the office. Neither option is desirable under quarantine.

Home networks under threat

Many people work with company information on home computers. You cannot know for sure how well protected they are, who else uses them, and how well those users understand modern cyberthreats. In other words, even if your employees have all been trained to recognize a malicious attachment, that is no guarantee your corporate data won’t be encrypted through the fault of someone else in their households.

Neighbors represent an additional danger. Who knows what other devices are connected to employees’ routers, and how people have configured access to shared folders?

Remember as well that modern cybercriminals try to steal data before encrypting it. And whereas in the past, if someone’s home computer got encrypted, it was purely their problem, nowadays, ransomware at home may cause confidential work information to fall into cybercriminals’ hands. That makes a home attack on an employee a corporate problem — your problem.

Security solution

We understand that most companies that were forced to suddenly send their employees into the world of remote working did not budget for additional security solutions, at least not for each and every employee’s home computer. But that’s no reason to leave them unprotected. Our Kaspersky Anti-Ransomware Tool for Business is specially tailored to deal with ransomware.

First, it can coexist with most other solutions, even those from other companies, thereby creating an additional layer of protection. Second, we recently updated it with a feature to guard against exploits (most types of ransomware penetrate the system through unpatched vulnerabilities). And third, thanks to this module, Kaspersky Anti-Ransomware Tool for Business is now even better at protecting outdated systems, such as Windows 7, for which support was discontinued earlier this year.

You can learn more about Kaspersky Anti-Ransomware Tool for Business and download the solution here.