When you work from home, it’s important to secure your network access, but also data present on your computer, paper printouts, and auxiliary storage such as thumb drives and personal cloud storage. Any time you receive company data, their data disposal policies apply.
Keeping Your Perimeter Secure
Important ways to “protect your perimeter” when you’re working at home include:
- Ensuring that your network router is properly configured and secured.
- Using a VPN for encryption and identity protection.
- Using specified cloud services and storage to keep data off your computer.
- Avoiding the use of external storage, including thumb drives, that expose data and bring malware.
Is “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” Good Security Policy?
There’s a modern tendency to find our way through rules based on our own understanding. It’s the source of endless online videos of personal disasters, as people learn the hard way. For information security, professionals assume that they don’t know all the risks involved, as cybercriminals are creatively seeking new exploits.
Social Engineering is Much More Effective Than Software Manipulation
While network intrusions get more press coverage, the most common way for a company to get “hacked” is through an employee’s decision to bypass security, often simply to be “helpful.” These are called social engineering exploits, but they’re basically con jobs, the same as they have been over centuries.
Following Established Practices Uses Professional Wisdom Born of Painful Lessons
Pros use a set of basic rules to avoid being blindsided, so it’s worth learning and following corporate policy 24/7. Making one exception that “makes sense” is what hackers count on when they send you an email to open, a link to click on, or another mechanism to give them access to your employer’s secure world. Protecting against criminals who also exploit your company’s physical data, it’s important to consider your equipment as data vulnerabilities until returned.
Once You’re Responsible for Your Company’s Data, How do You Secure It?
For most companies, your responsibility for their data in your home will end when you return the equipment, printouts, and related material to a company facility for processing. Your company should be using Keystone Technology Management, which provides secure data disposal in New York, to take care of that final step for your data. Call us for more information on our secure, certified, HIPAA-compliant data destruction process.