Secure Remote Working During COVID-19 — Checklist for CISOs

Security vendors, unintendedly, contribute to this burden by a
relentless generation of noise in the form of attack reports, best
practices, tips, and threat landscape analysis.

Here we have a new “CISO Checklist for Secure Remote
Working” (download
here^[1]) that has been built to
assist CISOs in navigating through this noise, providing them with
a concise and high-level list of the absolute essentials needed to
ensure their organization is well protected in these challenging
times.

The Coronavirus quarantine forces us to face a new reality. It
is critical to acknowledge this new reality in order to understand
how to successfully confront these changes.

Make no mistake – these changed apply to any organization,
regardless of its former security posture.
For example, an organization with a high maturity level that
routinely monitors its user’s behavior to detect anomalies must now
alter its policies to adjust to the mass remote workload.

On the other hand, organizations with lesser maturity that could
contain the risk of not placing advanced protection on their email
systems and endpoints now realize that they have a critical
security gap that must be addressed.

5 Pillars of Secure Remote Working

The CISO Checklist for Secure Remote Working breaks down the
Coronavirus derived changes in reality and maps them to concrete
check-boxes.

It’s important to the point that the checklist does not dive
into the actual implementation since it can be carried out in
multiple ways with respect to the internal policies and preferences
of each organization.

The CISO Checklist for Secure Remote Working is built of five
pillars:

• Security Technology — a recommended list of product
  categories that should be installed and configured. The guideline
  in choosing these categories was an aggregated analysis of the
  Coronavirus related threat landscape gathered from multiple threat
  intelligence and attack analysis sources.
• Security Team — every team, regardless of size and
  dedication level, has a set of procedures to handle ongoing
  security operations routinely. These procedures must be at the very
  least refreshed, and in many aspects, updated to address the
  specific IT and cyberattack changes.
• General Workforce — CISOs know better than anyone
  else that a man is a far weaker link than a machine. The built-in
  uncertainty that the Coronavirus brings makes people significantly
  more vulnerable to all sorts of social engineering manipulations.
  Awareness, education, and security drills are essential to arm your
  workforce against these vastly increasing attacks.
• 3rd Party Service Providers — whether your
  organization performs all its security tasks in-house or not, it is
  definitely a time to consider outsourcing some of the more
  skill-dependent mission to a domain expert MSSP – or at least make
  sure that all IR and security management operations are adequately
  covered.
• Management Visibility — The organization’s
  executives must have full visibility both into the CISOs efforts as
  well as to the actual security posture – is there an increase in
  attacks, do security teams and products operate as expected, has
  there been a breach and if so how was it managed and contained,
  etc. Every CISO must have the infrastructure to effortlessly
  produce these reports.

You can Download the CISO
Checklist^[2] for Secure Remote
Working here.