Improving your password game.
Many companies around the world are settling into a future where most people work from home, at least for a while.
Working from home comes with many benefits, but there are downsides from a security point of view. Most modern enterprises have spent significant chunks of their security budget on securing their perimeter. Sure everything is moving to the cloud and most of the workforce has been mobile for some time, but many IT departments still rely on people either physically coming into the office or using VPN. Without this patches cannot to be pushed to machines, updates cannot be applied, and perimeter IPS and IDS systems cannot pick up connections to C2 and malicious URLs that traditional AV missed.
When it comes to security, most enterprises aren't set up for people to work outside the wire for sustained periods.
What are the risks of working outside the wire?
The chances are that when your employees are working from home, the only thing protecting them from the internet is the router supplied by their ISP. A mis-configured router could expose your laptop directly to the internet, or a compromised device expose you to hackers and bots.
No one is probably monitoring the devices on your network at home for malicious activity and a company can't assume that everyone has a home network that is free from compromised machines, viruses and malware.
90% of enterprise security usually comes down to network segregation, patching, and identity management.
90% of enterprise security usually comes down to network segregation, patching, and identity management. There's not much a company can do to enforce network segregation on home networks your patching and identity management games are going to have to be really strong.
Password management at home
People chose rubbish passwords. Hackers know this and will hit anything exposed to the internet.
This is a visualization of real attacks against a honeypot exposed to the internet. These aren't port scans or people connecting by accident, these are real failed login attempts by bots and hackers.
This single honeypot is being hit with over 3000 login attempts a day. There are many ways to mitigate these sorts of attacks on an enterprise level, or even at the hobbyist level. A simple IPS, basic WAF or the humble fail2ban will easily protect against basic attacks like this.
Very few household networks have any protection against brute force attacks.
Unfortunately very few household networks have any protection against brute force attacks in place. This means that now more than ever it is important to have good strong passwords and multi-factor authentication in place.
If you want to see what passwords hackers are currently using, click on the image here to see a semi-regularly updated list of usernames and passwords collected by honeypots.
Just making it in at number 20 is 1qaz2wsx. For a second this seems like a good password until you notice it's a pattern on the keyboard. Non-dictionary words and patterns on keyboards are not good enough anymore.
There are some really strong passwords in the list such as J5cmmu=Kyf0-br8CsW. Some of these stronger ones are interesting because they appear to be passwords used by botnets that have taken over devices. I'll do a separate blog post on this in the future.
When your team are working from home, passwords need to be able to withstand a beating that they might not be exposed to in the office. Security professionals always recommend password managers however people still aren't using them. There are also plenty of passwordless options and hardware tokens such a yubikeys to protect accounts. These all take time to implement but now is the time to roll those tools out.
Bottom line on passwords
If you can only do one thing, stop expecting users to think of good passwords. Get them to use their password manager to generate the passwords or at least use tools like https://toughpassword.com to generate passwords that are tough to brute force or crack.
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