Fortifying Your Infrastructure: Best Practices for Controlled Public Remote Access

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a secure and encrypted connection that allows remote access to internal network resources is crucial for ensuring maximum productivity, flexibility, and exceptional customer support. That’s where innovative technologies like IPSEC/SSL VPN, cloud-based access gateways, or Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) come into play. By encrypting communication between authorized users and the organization’s network, these technologies maintain data privacy and security, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access or interception. With this advanced technology in place, organizations can provide secure remote access to internal systems, applications, files, and resources while ensuring the data’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability. By investing in secure remote access solutions, businesses can offer their employees and contractors a flexible work environment that promotes productivity and collaboration while keeping sensitive data safe and secure.

Common Pitfalls: Where Organizations Fall Short in Public Remote Access Security

Research shows that a significant percentage of businesses, around 63%, have faced the problem of data breaches due to their remote employees or contractors. At Infosec (T) Limited, we offer specialized cyber consultation services to organizations of all sizes. During our consultations, we noticed common issues when employees or contractors are granted access to critical internal assets from public networks.

• Inadequate Access Controls: Organizations often fail to implement precise access controls, granting users more access than necessary. Business users and administrators should not share the same remote access profile, as it provides more access than necessary for business users.
• Weak Authentication Methods: Many organizations still rely on weak authentication methods, such as simple passwords created on VPNs or Access Gateways, which can be easily compromised by attackers. Furthermore, many organizations do not implement multifactor authentication for secondary verification, which leaves them vulnerable to identity theft. 
• Lack of secured communication channels: Failure to encrypt data transmission leaves sensitive information vulnerable to interception by cyber criminals.
• Insufficient Monitoring: Inadequate monitoring of remote access activities makes detecting unauthorized access or suspicious behavior difficult.
• Poor Endpoint Security: Many organizations do not have proper methods to evaluate their endpoints’ security with public remote access. As a result, endpoints that lack proper security measures, such as outdated antivirus software or the absence of device encryption, can make the organization vulnerable to risks from compromised endpoints.
• Outdated software on VPN or Remote Access Gateway: Organisations that fail to perform regular critical and security software updates on their VPNs or Access Gateways may be vulnerable to security breaches and unauthorized access.
• Limited User Training: Remote access without proper security awareness exposes potential threats due to insufficient training for remote users on security best practices.

Unveiling the Unknown: Understanding Public Remote Access in Your Organization

Many organizations find it challenging to identify individuals who have public remote access to their systems and networks. Moreover, regularly validating and assessing remote access privileges, such as conducting periodic access reviews, audit trails, and compliance checks, is equally challenging.

Organizational users who require public remote access can be categorized based on their roles, responsibilities, and specific needs for accessing internal resources remotely.

Here are some common categories of users who may need public remote access

• Employees: Employees from various departments, including sales, marketing, finance, HR, and operations, may need to work remotely while traveling or during business trips. This group of users needs granular access control to front-end applications, which are mostly browser-based and use HTTPS protocol to support business operations. The “easiest” way to provide secure access is through SSL VPN or a web-based Access Gateway that requires minimal technical knowledge from end users.
• Technical Users: IT administrators, system engineers, and technical support staff are responsible for managing and troubleshooting IT infrastructure, systems, and applications. They need remote access to ensure the smooth operation of IT services. Their access extends beyond web-based access and includes access to back-end systems using administrative protocols such as RDP, SSH, and DB connections. Therefore, SSL VPN or IPSEC VPN is the ideal connection to maintain network connectivity and resolve technical issues.
• Contractors and Consultants: Organizations may need to hire external contractors, consultants, or third-party vendors to provide specialized expertise or support for specific projects or tasks. This may require temporary or project-based access to the organization’s systems or data. To enable this access, individual VPN or site-to-site VPN can be used with the organization’s support.
• Business Partners and Clients: External partners, clients, or stakeholders require remote access to shared documents, updates, or collaborative platforms for joint initiatives or client engagements. Limited access is often granted to specific resources or shared workspaces for collaboration purposes.
• Temporary Workers: Temporary or seasonal workers requiring short-term remote access for assignments, projects, or workload peaks may need basic office applications, email, and collaboration tools.

Building Robust Security Controls for Public Remote Access: Safeguarding Your Organization’s Digital Perimeter

Protecting public remote access from cyber threats is a top priority for organizations. This article explores strategies for building strong security controls to safeguard your organization’s digital perimeter. This ensures that employees or consultants can work remotely without compromising the security of the organization’s data and systems. Additionally, robust security controls help maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards, prevent unauthorized access and cyber-attacks, and preserve the organization’s reputation by demonstrating a commitment to protecting sensitive information.

• Utilize Secure Communication Channels: Authorized personnel or organizations should be granted remote access only when secure communication channels such as IPSEC/SSL VPN or TLS are utilized to establish secure connections over the Internet. Such channels provide encryption, which is essential for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data. By adhering to this best practice, an organization can minimize the risk of unauthorized access and protect its valuable digital assets from cyber threats.
• Centralize User Management for Public Remote Access: A central Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform manages user identities and access privileges. This platform is integrated with Active Directory or LDAP servers, which ensures that user accounts and access policies are synchronized. Remote access solutions then use this centralized IAM platform for authentication and authorization. This centralized approach streamlines access control, ensures consistency, and enhances security for remote access scenarios.
• Multi-Factor Authentication: To improve security and prevent unauthorized access, it is highly recommended to use multi-factor authentication. This method requires multiple forms of identification, such as passwords, biometrics, smart cards, or OTPs. Even if one of the credentials is compromised, the additional layers of security can prevent unauthorized access. At Infosec (T) Limited, we have a team of specialists who can implement multi-factor authentication solutions from various vendors, including Cisco Duo, RSA SecurID, Okta, Microsoft, and more.
• Enforce Least Privilege Access: To minimize the impact of a security breach and reduce the attack surface, organizations need to limit access to the resources and systems that are necessary for each user’s role or function. By enforcing least privilege access, user roles can be defined with specific permissions tailored to job responsibilities. Access policies should be implemented to dictate who can access what resources under which conditions eg. one-time access, etc. Using a bastion host, such as those from Citrix or BeyondTrust, can help in this regard.
• Device Trust and Security: To ensure the security of their networks, organizations need to ensure that only authorized and secure devices can connect to them. This can be done through various means, including endpoint security assessments, device profiling, and network access control. Technologies like certificate-based authentication and device-specific credentials are used to verify device identity. In addition, endpoint security agents monitor device security to ensure that all required security features, such as antivirus, encryption, and specific applications, are in place. These comprehensive measures help to facilitate safe and compliant remote access to corporate resources.
• Monitor and Audit Remote Access Activities: Using logging and monitoring tools to keep track of remote access activities in real time is recommended. Examples of such tools include Citrix and BeyondTrust remote access solutions that offer granular control at the application, database, or server level and maintain audit trails of remote user activities. It is important to regularly review the logs and audit trails to identify suspicious behavior, unauthorized access attempts, or security incidents.
• Patch and Update Systems Regularly: Keep remote access VPNs or devices up-to-date with the latest security patches and software updates. Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software to gain unauthorized access to the network.
• Educate Users on Security Best Practices: Remote users should receive comprehensive security awareness training that covers strong passwords, phishing awareness, secure browsing habits, and the risks of unauthorized access. The training should also empower users to recognize and report security threats, which can help mitigate risks.

Engage our Experts.

At Infosec, we recognize the importance of securing your network by implementing controlled remote access for the public. This is crucial to protect sensitive data and maintain a secure digital environment. Organizations can mitigate the risk of unauthorized access and cyber threats by adopting robust security measures such as multi-factor authentication, encryption, and granular access controls. It is essential to ensure device trust and security to ensure that only authorized and secure devices can connect to the corporate network. At the same time, continuous monitoring and automated remediation enable swift responses to security incidents.

Contact us through info@infosecltd.com, and let us begin the Fortifying Your Network for Controlled Public Remote Access journey.