#9 Telework Securing Your Home Office
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on Mon Aug 03 2020 17:00:00 GMT-0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
with Darren W Pulsipher, Steve Orrin,
Securing your device and your data center only gets you so far. With more people working from home you need to help your employee secure their home network and work area. In this episode, Steve Orrin, Federal CTO at Intel helps Darren secure his home network.
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System Security Tips
The first thing you want to do to secure your home office is to update all of your systems. This includes both applications and operating systems on all your internet connected devices. You will also want to update end point security software and run regular scans when your device is on. Many people know to do this on their desktop or laptop, but endpoint security should also be deployed on phones and tablets as well. In addition, be sure to turn on your local firewall and enable your router’s firewall.
One of the major steps you can do to reduce your overall risk while you are on the internet is to reduce the runtime surface area of attack. This means you should close applications that are not in use, close the browser before going to new sites, and log out or close secure sessions before doing activities such as checking email or browsing. You should not be doing different activities simultaneously to avoid cross attacks.
A good education site for learning how to safely browse the internet is Stop. Think. Connect. https://www.stopthinkconnect.org/
Modem/Router/Wifi Security Tips
Change all default passwords to secure passwords (minimum of 8 – 10 characters, use upper and lower case, numbers and characters). Default passwords come with routers, modems, ISP web portals, and WiFi. Carefully guard who has access to your passwords. It’s also important to change the default network name (SSID) to something without any identifying information.
Enabling two-factor authentication wherever possible will give you another layer of security. Routers and modems need to be updated just like your laptop, so be sure to turn on automatic updates.
Other steps to increase security include turning on WPA and disabling WPS if possible. Enable network address translation (NAT) and DNS filtering on the router and modem. You will also want to disable UPnP.
These techniques will prevent unauthorized people and your neighbors from “borrowing” your WiFi, which creates a security risk.