Pandemic and Security of the Laptops

Many employees work in the home office and IT attacks are on the rise. That’s why companies need new preemptive security solutions. In the pandemic, many companies had to digitize without having planned it. They brought large parts of their staff to the home office. This was achieved in many places despite the time pressure, video conferencing and collaboration tools are now very popular.

But there are significant risks in the Home Office. Mostly from the private WLAN, employees enter the company network and become a new danger. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of this situation and are increasingly attacking devices such as PCs and notebooks. Meanwhile, new malware is constantly appearing. But if the malware is still unknown, these attacks escape traditional firewalls, web and e-mail filters, or antivirus solutions.

Isolated in the home office, people also become a greater security risk, no longer warns a colleague about a dangerous e-mail. To discourage users from making false clicks, companies mark emails saying “this is an external mail.” Weak protection.

 

And the IT infrastructure is growing happily

 

In addition, modern enterprise environments consist of numerous cloud-based services and infrastructures. You provide connections to mobile devices and IoT devices via VPN or within a fictitious corporate perimeter. In such highly distributed environments, the traditional approach of trusting all devices in principle fails.

This is where the zero-trust concept starts. The identity and integrity of devices are constantly checked in real-time. Regardless of where a user accesses the company network and which applications they call.

The zero-trust concept is followed by many companies. The problem is that Zero Trust cannot be implemented on an ad hoc basis. IT and security managers need to coordinate with business leaders. This is time-consuming. Most companies, however, want a workable middle ground that, on the one hand, takes IT risks seriously, but on the other hand does not isolate everything so uncompromisingly that business processes suffer.

 

How to protect application insulation

 

A reasonable way is application isolation, which is realized by virtualization. A Micro Virtual Machine (Micro-VM) creates an application environment that is completely isolated from the production system. This opens the files and examines and logs their behaviour.

For example, if a user wants to open an external Word document, it is paged and opened in the micro VM. If there is malicious code or ransomware in the document, execution may not affect the device. Only the micro VM may be corrupted. However, since a micro-VMs is used only once, this does not bother. The same applies to websites. The user cannot open them in the production system. Host and back-end systems continue to operate unaffected, everything remains limited to the virtual instance.

 

How to disinfect your laptop

 

Apart from the IT attacks, the biological virus is a big risk. According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), disinfecting is the use the chemicals to kill germs on surfaces. To disinfect your laptops, you should shut down it, use a micro-fibre cloth and alcohol-based solution (with at least 70 per cent isopropyl alcohol). After such wet-cleaning, you should allow it to dry. UVC radiation may also be effective in inactivating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the virus that causes the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).

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