During the Covid-19 pandemic response, the foundation of business has shifted, and traditional brick-and-mortar employees were sent home to become remote workers with few resources, planning, or testing of the processes. Business continuity took primacy over insider threat vulnerabilities that were created when business/legal requirements demanded workers be sent home. Out of necessity, the remote worker’s network security, however diminished or robust, became the weak link in their employer’s network security.  Consequently, employees have been given a greater responsibility for not only their productivity and connectivity but also for the security of the company’s network with little oversight and/or policy governance to guide them. 

The aforementioned situation creates challenges in detecting the insider threat among remote workers. Standard insider threat detection tripwires of “see something, say something,” are no longer in play as the remote workers’ actions are no longer viewed by their coworkers. Remote workers maybe using their own devices and may not be well-versed in how to adequately secure those devices which may then be compromised by hackers. Sharing devices with family members or cohabitants may lead to additional security concerns that their actions create as well.  These are just a few of the security concerns that remote working has created. It is at this point that technology can assist in not only protecting networks from ransomware and malware, but also providing network insight into the insider threat from both the user and machine activities. Technologies such as Nomerel’s Raptor provides daily and weekly reports as to internal vulnerabilities and their remediation, as well as providing patching updates which is critical to maintaining robust network security. Nomerel also has the capability of conducting deep scans of your network to detect external vulnerabilities and corrective action to address those vulnerabilities.