Security Tips for Meeting and Home Office
Hi all,
One of our beliefs is that there is no such thing as being too security-aware. While we already published a range of articles about cyber and online security on this blog, we will never get tired of posting even more. And therefore: Let's begin!
Based on the ongoing special situation with the global Coronavirus pandemic and our product portfolio, we want to share 6 Security Tipps for Meeting and Home Office. As most of you reading this are currently at home, I think you will agree on the below-mentioned points.
Beating real-life and virtual viruses
One year later, and still, the world is fighting the Coronavirus, which dictates how we live our lives at the moment.
We are trying to protect as many people as possible from getting the Coronavirus, and also - we work on measures to get immune against it. Vaccines are bearing our hopes.
It might not be a surprise for you, but we can translate the same into our online lives:
The world is fighting virtual viruses. We need to protect online users, our devices, and our networks from getting infected.
The danger of viruses is also dictating how we are behaving online. We can no longer open email attachments in good faith and without protection. We need to wear the internet edition of proper face masks: An endpoint protection solution like Remote Management.
For your meeting and home office setup, this leads us to our recommendation to use
- Proper Anti-Virus software that you keep up to date and armed all the time as well as
- PopUp blockers for your browser to sharpen your protection and to prevent potential malicious viruses or trojans from entering your devices.
Use 2-factor authentication
Enable 2-factor authentication on all your accounts and even decide which program to use based on this security feature's availability.
Even better would be if you could encourage your company to deploy SSO (=Single Sign-On) to make the 2-factor and security experience as quick and painless but at the same time also as secure as possible.
Knowing who is in a meeting and who has access to information and company networks is crucial. Today, even more than ever, when so many of us work from home and collaborate mainly via online meetings. 2-factor authentication is a simple but effective measure against identity theft.
Identity theft is not a peculiar offense but a serious crime. While misusing credit card information is nothing to joke about, industry espionage by hijacking business meetings can have an enormous economic effect on a single business and even a whole industry. And joining meetings claiming to be someone else or trying to access services is nothing but a kind of identity theft.
And it is much easier for fraudsters to do this if accounts are not appropriately protected.
Plan ahead and lock your meetings
When planning a meeting, make sure to use unique meeting IDs and passwords.
Schedule your calls ahead of time and invite your participants via email or messenger. Here, you can easily include the access details.
As emails can be forwarded, and you never know exactly who has the information for accessing our calls, we recommend checking the participants once everyone is in the call and removing those you did not invite. After all participants joined, lock the meeting to prevent any other people from joining.
If your call includes highly confidential information, you can even make video authentication a requirement. This, of course, only works if you know how a person looks.
Videocalls and privacy
Whether enabling video in meetings is a good or bad idea and whether we should recommend it, we thought about it a lot.
While I tend to believe having video enabled in a call with too many people is somewhat disturbing and counter-productive, I think having it enabled in smaller meetings with up to six or seven people is beneficial.
It is only human that we feel more comfortable when we can see our conversation partners and how they interact with us.
However, when using video, we should still keep some things in mind. I am not talking about questions about whether a background gives a professional or unprofessional impression.
Today, it is all about security: Do you have a whiteboard behind you with internal information like numbers or ideas or anything? Or is anywhere information available that is better not to be shared? If yes - remove it. Make a test and start a video call with a friend to test whether everything visible on your video is ok to be seen by others. Please keep in mind: Making a screenshot or picture or even a video recording of your transmission is quickly done, and you won't even notice it. How? By merely taking a photo or video with a mobile.
And last but not least: When not using your video, cover the lens. You can use a sticky note or a more professional lens-cover you can buy everywhere. Important is not how you cover it but that you are doing it.
Share single applications
When working from home and using online meetings to stay in touch, you will need to share your screen now and then.
Typical examples are your business presentations or brainstorming sessions on one of your projects.
Most software allows you to share your complete screen or choose single applications.
Our recommendation is to always strive to only share the application you want to present. Once you need to switch to another application, you can easily do this via the menu.
By sharing the full screen, you are really doing this, and the ones watching your screen can see everything. Our theory is that this is not in all situations needed or wanted. And as in the video topic above, people can make screenshots, images, or recordings of your screen without you noticing it.
Share single files
But we are not done yet as we have two more recommendations when it comes to sharing. This time it is about file sharing:
It has been proven to be beneficial to share the file discussed in a meeting afterward with the participants. Whether you open it up for collaborative edits in the cloud or only for review in un-editable files, is fully up to your requirements.
However, when you allow edits, make sure to keep a copy of your original version to be able to roll back.
And secondly, only share the single files and not your complete folder with the participants. Otherwise, they will have access to all files within the folder now and in the future until you remove the share again. Also, be mindful of the permissions and take a minute to decide who needs to be able to edit and who only needs to be able to view.
Did you know...
..that you can share files with TeamViewer too? The remote control feature allows you to share files with your connection partners via File transfer, Copy & Paste, Drag & Drop, Send file, or the file box. Learn more about it here:
With these 6 Security Tipps for Meeting and Home Office, we hope to help make the Internet a safer place for all of us and HomeOffice more secure and online meetings more enjoyable.
Best and Stay safe,
Esther
Former Community Manager
