Cybersecurity Advice: Five Tips on Mitigating the Threat of Device Sharing

Ain Alalam – Rashad Iskandrni

A recent Cisco survey reveals the surprising number of working parents who share their work devices with children, unsupervised and with knowledge of passcodes. Amid a complex threat landscape and within an ever-evolving, multifaceted work environment, security threats are prevalent.

Being a working parent is always challenging. No parent will be surprised to learn that work devices are sometimes shared with children. The Cisco survey among working parents, in Saudi Arabia, revealed that 97% of working parents have shared devices with children during the past six months. Crucially, of those who shared a device, 40% allow unsupervised access while sharing their passcodes, and 56% of those without access to passcodes remain unsupervised.

Of course, any access by an unauthorised individual to confidential data is a potential data breach. But with unauthorised child access there is the additional risk of inadvertent submission or deletion of data via an open browser tab or accidental email breaches. While we cannot fully eradicate threat nor human error, we can implement a zero-trust approach to security strategy to ensure that, as much as possible, the individual in front of the keyboard is the individual authorised to access the system or data.

Here Martin Lee who is leading Cisco Talos in EMEA, one of the most trusted threat intelligence research teams globally, provides five top tips to IT teams for mitigating the threat illustrated by the survey results.

1. Work with rather than against users. Allow users to create guest user accounts on devices to allow family members restricted use without access to business systems but benefitting from corporate cyber protection. Permitting guest accounts is less than ideal, but it’s better than having unauthorised users with full access to a device.

2. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA). When a user accesses a new application or system, verify that the user intended to perform the action through an MFA/2FA ping or biometric recognition. A simple additional verification step will almost certainly prevent curious children from accessing sensitive systems.

3. Keep sensitive data protected by a VPN. Not all data has equal security requirements, protect sensitive data so that it can only be accessed via VPN requiring the user to enter their username, password and verify via MFA/2FA.

4. Back-up, back-up and back-up again. The family home environment is hazardous for fragile electronic devices. Spilled coffee, lemonade or paint can easily disable a device, as can falls from height on to a tiled kitchen floor. Ensuring that important data isn’t lost and that replacement devices can be easily restored from backed-up data is vital to keeping hybrid workers operational.

5. Educate users about cyber security. Devious users have a nasty habit of finding ways to subvert security protections if they find that these protections get in the way of their goals. Make sure users are aware of the importance of cyber security, the consequences of getting it wrong, as well as common threats and attacks. Simple policies reinforced with sanctions for transgressions help users understand what is acceptable and what is not.