Is Your PC Costing You Sleep?
John woke up in a cold sweat. The question he just heard really chilled his bones. His wife was calling from the other room, saying, “did you leave your computer on last night?“ He had.
But he turned off on the screen, and the room should’ve been dark. Why would it be lit up now? The only thing he could think is, someone was on his home PC remotely and had activated the screen.
This is a terrifying possibility. If you have been using your home computer to connect to your office computer, your home computer is likely not secured anywhere nearly as well as your work computer. Do you have children using it, school work being done on it, wide-ranging Internet search being done on it, and connecting to the office and getting your work done. It is not a pristine environment.
Your work computer has all kinds of security like antivirus tools, two factor authentication, VPN, and anti-hacking tools, but your home PC has none of these.
It’s time to do a check up on your home PC.
How to Check Up on Your Home PC
Ask your company’s IT support group. Your corporate office may help you secure your home PC, and there’s a countless number of things that they can do that would really help.
- Join that computer to the domain
- Add corporate AV
- Add corporate anti-hacking software
- Add two factor authentication (solves 95% of all attacks)
- Join it to their Microsoft 365 Intune account
- Lock it with a password
- Turn on Facial Recognition (Window’s Hello through the camera on some laptops)
- Force logoffs at a particular time
- Force screen locks if you walk away from the PC. (This makes it VERY hard on a remote attacker)
But either way it’s still likely that your family is using the PC, and that event alone puts your entire company at risk.
The safest thing you can do is ask for a corporate PC to use if you’re going to continue working from home now that Covid is beginning to come under control.
What Does a Corporate PC Do for You?
A work PC does many really good things for your Boss.
- Keeps the family off your PC. No games installed, no browsing the internet and getting infected from a website.
- Allows the company to put all the security tools they need on the PC.
- Allows the company to remotely manage the PC for better support.
- Tools like VPNs are safer if coming from a corporate PC that is managed.
- Encryption of the entire PC is easy on a commercial-grade laptop. Not so on a consumer-grade laptop, as they often are built without PDM Chips. (A chip that links the encryption on the hard drive to that PC only, and it won’t work in any other PC.)
If you are going to continue to work from home, talk seriously to your company about a corporate system that can be secured properly. Less sleepless nights is way better.
