In just a few days, along with many other disruptions, the workplace has been in massive upheaval. Instead of face-to-face meetings, local area network access and file sharing, and informal conversations in break rooms, we spend all our time video conferencing, using home Wi-Fi networks, and trying to keep in touch with colleagues in any way possible. . to see them in person. My workplace even hosts virtual yoga sessions with our instructor walking us through our poses in a web session. As much as I would have imagined wanting this just a few weeks ago, today is a welcome break from the onslaught of bad news. Thinking networked, organizations, to varying degrees, have welcomed and even encouraged a remote workforce for many years, but few large organizations have had to deal with the vast majority of their employees accessing corporate resources entirely from outside his office. Plots As a result, the VPN is the central connection point for most of the enterprise. But even as there are rampant attempts to ensure that the capacity of these networks is sufficient to support the increased demand, those who follow the threat landscape are concerned about the risk to businesses that rely on these services. A key aspect of risk is service availability. Our past experiences lead us to the following understanding: · Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks will occur against the availability of Internet services. This is nothing new – we see 8.4 million attacks in 2019 · The opponent, whatever their motivation, will be targeting the most important services at any given time. During these times, we can expect VPN concentrators to quickly rise to the top of the list of services businesses depend on. · Similarly, institutions that are focused today - government agencies, healthcare organizations, financial institutions - will see a level of targeting · The large population of people dissatisfied with time on their hands will contribute to this phenomenon. These are anxious times for all of us, and while the economic fallout is being felt across our populations, certain subgroups of society may be channeling their anger online. While the individual business or educational institution cannot solve the causes of these attacks on their own, they can certainly prepare for the eventuality that their online services consider remote access for employees, supplier and partner portals, sales online, educational tests, can be objective at the time, which poses new challenges in these already difficult times. There are a number of steps everyone can take to protect themselves from these attacks: · Reconsider what should be behind the VPN – if possible, use well-established SaaS services for productivity suites, collaboration tools, etc. This will reduce reliance on VPN in the first place Set up split tunneling and acceptable use policies – You don't want your employees gaming on your corporate computers and you certainly don't want them going through your VPN, both because of the added cost and the added cost . The risk of your network being targeted in a game. Take tabletop exercises to understand your DDoS stance, whether you're following best practices involving dedicated teams and a managed service to support you, or hoping to get lucky and not be objective (I wouldn't recommend it), it's imperative that you have a good handling how you expect to respond to a DDoS attack. It's much better than finding out while you're under attack. We have much to fear in these times and it is unfortunate that the availability of your remote services is on this list, but it is. Fortunately, there are well-known ways to overcome these challenges, unlike some of the others we face these days. Remote access to the network is at the forefront of technology that allows the company and those responsible for its availability to do everything possible to protect it.