Telecommuting security concerns grow

Telecommuting has become a way of life as more companies let employees work from home to do jobs that might otherwise be done on corporate premises. As a result, IT managers are adapting security policies to encompass home PCs.

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Last year an estimated 8.9 million telecommuters worked from home three or more days each month during regular business hours, according to IDC. A quarter of them worked exclusively from home. At places where home-based work has become the norm, IT managers say a key concern is ensuring each telecommuter's PC, typically granted remote access to a corporate LAN, keeps pace with office security guidelines.

"We have a fair number of employees who are telecommuters," says Dan Lukas, lead security architect at Wisconsin-based Aurora Health Care, which operates 13 hospitals, as well as dozens of clinics, with about 25,000 employees. "We're driven by the business, not the technology."

Several hundred Aurora employees work from home transcribing voice recordings made by physicians regarding their patients. These transcriptionists, situated all over the country, then remotely access Aurora's private-line network over the Internet to file each transcribed recording with a patient's online medical records.

Other types of telecommuters at Aurora include radiologists, who can access the network to look at medical images.

Kettering Medical Center Network, a group of five hospitals in Dayton, Ohio, with 7,000 employees and 1,200 physicians, is one of many hospitals that see growth in telecommuting.

"More and more, physicians want access to their offices from home, and we're giving radiologists secure access so they can read images from home," says Bob Burritt, Kettering Medical Center Network's director of technology.

According to IDC, healthcare is the industry in which telecommuting is most common, followed by the science and technical services arena, and manufacturing.

Lukas says Aurora transcriptionists who telecommute are given PCs with a standard image on them for hospital applications and security, such as antivirus. They also are required to use secure VPN access.

The hospital is migrating from a Cisco IPSec VPN to a Juniper SSL VPN, since it doesn't require special agent-based software to deploy.

Aurora's IT staff coordinate with a business manager in charge of these workers' assignments to ensure they have access only to the database resources they require.

Another group of Aurora's telecommuters, teleradiologists, may be called upon at home to examine medical images stored in Aurora's multigigabyte storage-area networks and server-based repositories.

With remote access a critical part of Aurora's daily operation, Aurora installed Lancope's StealthWatch intrusion-prevention system to repel denial-of-service attacks or break-in attempts.

Despite the industry buzz about automated procedures for checking a user's anti-virus and patch updates before granting network access, Lukas says Aurora officials, who recently tested Cisco's Network Admission Control products, believe that for the moment it's not a mature technology and is too expensive. "It would cost us US$50 per seat," he says.

Telecommuting is growing in acceptance, with IDC predicting there will be 9.9 million telecommuters by 2009. A wide variety of organizations are offering telecommuter support. The Defense Information Systems Agency, which supports the military through technical services, is considering letting its 5,000 employees, many of whom live in Northern Virginia, telecommute at least a few days per week.

The financial-services industry is stepping gingerly into telecommuting, with IT managers aware that government regulators and auditors will want to know about security controls on home-based computers.

At Pennsylvania State Employee Credit Union in Harrisburg, Pa., a few dozen of its 650 employees, primarily the managers, are allowed to work from home, says Rob Ballard, IT support manager at PSECU.

These telecommuters receive a standard-issue workstation from PSECU for home-based work, identical to what they are given in the office. In February, the credit union added Centennial Software's DeviceWall to its PCs to prevent USB mass-storage devices or iPods from gobbling data from any PC.

DeviceWall also lets machines work in read-only mode and can limit Wi-Fi connections and use of CDs. "We are audited frequently by internal and external auditors, and as a financial institution, we are held to a high standard," says Ballard, noting PSECU wants telecommuting to mirror its office IT security practices.

Consultant Tom Walsh recommends that organizations adopting telecommuting equip at-home employees with dedicated PCs to be used for work only.

"Don't allow shared computers," says Walsh, noting that it's poor practice to mix business and a family's home-computer use. "Kids are too smart. They know how to get things like keyloggers, and it's happened."

Walsh suggests a viable alternative might be installing a separate hard drive on a home computer with security controls that restrict access to all but the telecommuter.

Beyond simply having a telecommuter's PC mirror office PCs, Walsh recommends that businesses enter into signed agreements with telecommuters on exactly how home-based PCs are to be used. This helps establish not only that the business owns it but also how it's to be used and maintained.

A number of vendors, including CA with its Remote Unicenter, offer tools to manage Windows-based applications remotely.

Sioux Fleming, director of product management at CA, says she has seen insurance companies and other large companies hire third-party technical services to be on call to fix machines when telecommuters have trouble far from corporate headquarters.

While most companies deploy anti-virus software on telecommuter PCs, one type of security protection that's often overlooked is adding a desktop firewall, she notes.

"Port attacks are a real thing," Fleming points out. "And while people inside the corporate LAN are probably protected at the gateway, people working at home are not."