Cloudflare has debuted a new zero-trust tool designed to help protect remote employees from cyberattacks.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us out of the traditional office and into hastily-created home setups, instead, we — and the organizations we work for — were suddenly required to rely on either personal or company on-loan devices to continue performing our jobs.
When it comes to cybersecurity, this means that the potential attack surface for threat actors increased due to remote and end-user devices that needed to connect to corporate resources.
According to Reboot Online, 44% of businesses in the UK alone have experienced a security breach since stay-at-home orders were imposed, a 20% increase year-over-year.
Working from home, whether as a permanent option or as part of hybrid models, may become standard, and so the corporate world needs to consider how best to keep their networks protected whilst also catering to a remote workforce.
To this end, Cloudflare has contributed a new zero-trust solution for browser sessions. On Tuesday, the web security firm launched Cloudflare Browser Isolation, software that creates a “gap” between browsers and end-user devices in the interests of safety.
Instead of employees launching local browser sessions to access work-related resources or collaborative tools, the service runs the original, requested web page in the cloud and streams a replica to the end-user.
Cloudflare says that tapping into the firm’s global network to run browser sessions circumvents the usual speed downgrades and potential lag caused by typical, pixel-based streaming.
As there is no direct browser link, this can mitigate the risk of exploits, phishing, and cyberattacks. In addition, Cloudflare automatically blocks high-risk websites based on existing threat intelligence.
The solution has now been made available through Cloudflare for Teams.
“Everyone uses a web browser, and that makes it the perfect target for attackers all over the world,” commented Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO. “We don’t believe that the most effective protection to these attacks should be restricted to a handful of large companies with huge IT teams. Cloudflare Browser Isolation can be deployed by anyone in just a few clicks and automatically protects against the majority of threats people face online.”
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