Staying Connected, Staying Protected: IT Security Basics for Community Managers
David Leonhardt
If your company is like most community or property management firms, then your workforce is highly mobile. On any given day you likely have employees working from home, a managed community, a coffee shop, a vendor’s office… and occasionally even from their actual office! While this flexibility greatly improves productivity and employee morale, it also creates numerous opportunities for the proverbial bad guys – and please trust me, there are most definitely bad guys – to exploit vulnerabilities resulting in annoying to catastrophic levels of damage. If you aren’t talking with your IT provider about security measures for your mobile workforce, then that should be agenda item #1 at the next IT meeting. Here are a few topics to consider:
Hopefully you’ve already covered the basics: • You have a strong password policy with a minimum of eight characters, requiring numbers, punctuation and mixed case, lockout after ten failed logins, and everyone’s favorite… changing passwords every 90 days. Critical too is that the policy is enforced by your domain, not left to the discretion of the employee.
• Every firm will eventually lose a laptop, and when that happens your only real line of defense is an encrypted hard drive. The strong password isn’t enough to save you here.
• No one in your firm would be caught dead without their mobile phone, and regardless of the brand I trust you’ve deployed things like mandatory unlock codes, remote wipe and possibly find-my-phone services.
20 Community Associations Journal | January/February 2017
Moving the conversation along you might want to consider more advanced security measures. Again, you’re doing some smart things by being mobile, but part of being mobile is being able to run faster than that other guy when the bad guys come looking.
• If you’re using a VPN, a Terminal Server, a Citrix Server or even an application like Go2MyPC or LogMeIn then please recognize that you’ve essentially built a front door from your environment onto the Internet. Remember those bad guys? The safety of that door is governed largely by the strength of your password policy, but even so you should also be using a Two Factor Authentication (TFA) solution. This allows access only if the user has both something they know (their password) and something they have (a text message or email sent at the time of login).
• Obviously you’re running an anti-virus system, but even the best of these will eventually be defeated by either a brand- new exploit or a user that inadvertently clicked on a bad link. In that case you’ll want some sort of threat response solution in place that will help you to isolate, remediate and very importantly forensically determine what the bad guys did during their attack.
• Have you ever heard the phrase “local administrator rights”? If your users have said privileges then they are able to install and update software; this is great for user convenience letting them customize their environment, and at the outset it reduces the number of help desk calls for “could you come
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