It doesn’t matter how big is your company, for sure you use the internet to carry out your operations, driving communication, collaboration, and commerce, especially that organizations nowadays increasingly rely on digital tools and platforms, so the risk of cyber threats has also grown significantly. Adding to this the remote and hybrid work styles, where risks extend beyond office walls to remote employees’ home networks, and employees are no longer protected by an organization’s on-prem security solutions.

In general both remote employees and in the office face a range of threats from the public Internet, they may face a phishing sites or web pages, malicious files, sensitive data may be stolen or uploaded to one of the SaaS platforms, and more.

That’s why securing the internet access is a key element to safeguard your organization against the web based threats and secure your employee and customers data as well. 

In this article will try Understanding the Threat Landscape, and talking about the best practices we need to follow to secure our internet access.

Understanding the Threat Landscape:

As we mentioned before, the internet is full of the risks and traps, hackers are using the internet to compromise you and steal your data, your credentials, or your customer data.

Businesses today face a range of sophisticated threats coming from the internet, including phishing attacks, ransomware, malware, and data breaches, and for companies with remote or hybrid workforces, these threats are even more challenging to manage, as each remote connection point potentially creates a new avenue for attackers.

1) Phishing and social engineering attacks:

One of the most common threats, phishing, where hackers use emails or messages designed to trick employees into sending sensitive information or installing malicious software into their PCs. Remote employees are often more vulnerable to phishing attempts, as they may lack the immediate support or validation from colleagues that they would have in an office setting. 

Social engineering attacks have also evolved to exploit personal circumstances, targeting remote workers by impersonating familiar contacts, such as colleagues or HR representatives.

2) Ransomware:

In this attack the hacker gains access to a company’s network and devices to access its information. Once this is done, the data is encrypted and the company no longer has access to these documents. In order for it to be able to regain this access, the company is required to pay a ransom amount.

3) Data and password leak:

For all the companies data is the most important thing trying to secure and keep it safe, as all the business may be connected to this data, that’s why also it is always a main target to the hackers to steal it or to encrypt it as we said, adding to this the passwords that employees use to access the company apps or data bases, These access passwords in the wrong hands can cause a lot of problems for companies.

4) Shadow IT risks:

“Shadow IT” refers to the use of unauthorized software or applications by employees. With remote work, employees might download tools to improve productivity without considering security matters or IT approval. This creates security risks, as unauthorized applications may lack the necessary security controls, leaving company data vulnerable.

How Does Secure Internet Access work?

Understanding the threats is the first step toward implementing effective security measures. As the cyber threat landscape continues to grow and improve their technics, businesses must prioritize strategies to mitigate these risks, especially for employees working outside traditional office environments.

Securing the Internet Access should be designed to inspect and protect inbound and outbound traffic between a user’s machine and the public Internet. This can be done in a couple of ways:

• In-Browser Protection:

We can install an agent in the user’s browser so it can inspect Internet traffic on the endpoint itself. This provides secure and private web browsing without incurring latency or redirecting traffic to an inspection point.

• Providing a cloud protection:

In this case we deploy a cloud based security solution to protect all the employees’ devices wherever they are working from, and accessing the company tools and applications, and in this case the solution works for all devices, providing protection for those that might be unable to support in-browser agents.

Now ok, we know how to deploy, let’s talk about what protections should have. As we understood the threats landscape earlier, the main protections to have are:

• Malware Protection:

Securing the devices against the malware is very important, and for that All downloads should be inspected for malicious content in a sandboxed environment and be sanitized using content disarm and reconstruction (CDR). Solutions should also identify and automatically remediate malware infections and virtually patch vulnerabilities in users’ browsers.

• Data Loss Protection

The internet access security should prevent any attempt to share or send sensitive data using the internet; this includes blocking sharing or storage of sensitive information on unsanctioned social media, SaaS applications, and file-sharing services.

• Phishing Protection

A secure Internet access solution should protect the users agains the phishing sites or massages, with help of artificial intelligence (AI). This includes inspection of all the pages especially with passwords boxes and looking for a wide range of potential phishing indicators.

• Credential Theft protection:

An Internet access security solution should prevent the user from sharing his credentials on the web pages, or reuse it in the corporate apps. 

• Access Control

That mean, the solution should have a full control on what websites or SaaS applications that users can visit, including URL filtering to enables an organization to block visits to inappropriate or dangerous sites

The solution should support Zero day protection and SSL inspection, as most Internet traffic is encrypted, and visibility into encrypted traffic is essential to identifying web-based attacks.

When we choose the solution it is essential also to take into consideration the user privacy and experience.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, it is very important to protect our employee access to the internet but also we need to know that the path to a secure digital workplace is not static. It requires constant wariness, regular reassessment of security strategies, and staying updated with the latest advancements in cybersecurity. By investing in these efforts, businesses can better position themselves against evolving threats, secure infrastructure that supports productivity and growth no matter where their employees are working.