What if the attackers:
- Hack your organization’s network, then
- Hack your remote workers’ work computers, and then
- Use the remote workers’ work computers to encrypt all the computers in the worker’s family household?
That could mean that all of your workers’ families lose all of their family’s photographs, students’ schoolwork, and everything on household computers. And they would blame this on your company.
If the families lose their data and don’t have good backups of their computers, are you prepared for when your employees demand that you pay a ransom so they can recover their family’s data?
One way to help protect yourself against being in this undesirable situation is to ensure your work-from-home users have a different Internet connection besides the connection the rest of the household uses. Their home will have two separate networks: One network for the family devices and an independent network for their work computer.
Issuing 4G or 5G mobile hotspots to your work-from-home users is one way to allow workers to work from home without using their home networks.
If you don’t want to issue hotspots to all of your workers, another option is to pay for an additional Internet line at their home. If their Internet Service Provider says they will only install one Internet connection at one of your worker’s houses, tell the provider to pretend your home is a duplex so they will install two connections. Or sign up for a separate connection with a different provider.
Will this reach a point where your organization provides your workers external hard drives so they can back up their family computers?
Please forward this to your fellow executives so that, even though everyone is used to protecting company networks from remote worker’s home networks, it is time to think about safeguarding home networks from your company network.