Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely?

Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by WestCoastJustin on Sunday March 15, 2015 @01:35AM (#9205496)

Having worked in an enviroment with people traveling all over the world to conferences, this has happened countless times, although it is much more likely something will be forgotten, or lost, rather than stolen when on the road. Nothing magical, and all common sense, just try to limit your exposure. Here is a quick list:

  - VPN (no split tunnel)
  - 2FA
  - loner laptop pool (with base OS and their presentation)
    - do not take sensitive data off-site
    - encrypted hard disk
    - antivirus
    - screen locks after X minutes
  - let office know if something happens (lock out accounts)

Operate from the standpoint that this is going to happen. Work to limit your exposure. You really want to separate your work and personal life as much as possible, by using two computers, as your personal habits, can have big impacts on your work. I know this is not really what you wanted re: working at Github, but I think most of this still applies. I think a lot of opsec applies to this two.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by heyalexej on Sunday March 15, 2015 @01:41AM (#9205510)

I guess the "forgotten" and "didn't think about it" part can't be underestimated. I work from coworking spaces and coffee shops in Asia. People do dev work and business related tasks from these places. The devs spin up servers and have databases with standard passwords exposed on the network. Sometimes they might have client or company data dumped into the DB's to work with. It's scary.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by jasonjei on Sunday March 15, 2015 @05:11AM (#9205902)

I agree with the above post--I can't even count all the times I've seen people bring in a corporate laptop (complete with an asset tag and call if lost sticker--that's just begging for theft attention) at a public coffee house left unattended. If you are going to bother using a VPN 2-factor token and privacy screen, please keep your laptop in your custody and view at all times. Ideally, work from a private executive or home office if you're a remote worker, or on-site at the company. If you must work at a coffee shop, please be sure you don't have PII easily accessible or valuable financial data waiting to be pried (that includes being on a VPN that can potentially have access to such data).

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by heyalexej on Sunday March 15, 2015 @05:58AM (#9205969)

re: "asset tag and call if lost sticker".

I think it's also a great idea to not have your user and hostname set to be "johnbigbucks@bestinvestconsulting" but something more generic or randomized. I use something like this to randomize my hostname.

  awk 'length==6' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v '[^[:alpha:]]' | shuf -n 1 | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by philsnow on Sunday March 15, 2015 @06:09PM (#9208405)

because i'm somehow compelled to golf such things (like unnecessary use of cat):

    egrep '^[[:alpha:]]{6}$' /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n 1 | tr A-Z a-z

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by heyalexej on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @04:37PM (#9228516)

Yep, that's elegant. It's so easy to write bad bash scripts that I do it all the time. So much to learn on my end.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Maintain Security When Working Remotely? by philsnow on Thursday March 19, 2015 @02:55PM (#9233858)

Thanks for your post btw, I did not know about this tool `shuf`. My equivalent involves `sort -r | head -1`

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