this is susan bradley for cso online recently the cybersecurity infrastructure security agency
released several documents with recommendations for their federal agencies one such release
included the topic of securing web browsers and defending against malvertising as we enter the era
of more and more cloud computing and the removal of adobe flash from our browsers we need to step
back reevaluate our needs for what is starting to be our portal to more and more technology
as noted on the csa site browsers first and foremost are how we interact with the internet
in the past we used to install multiple browsers on our system
starting with the baseline of internet explorer we'd layer on chrome possibly firefox and now
we have edge and mind you we have new edge which is based on the chromium code
and i hope you're in the process of removing flash from your environment
and also standardizing on chrome or edge and edge in particular has new
settings and group policy settings that you can use to deploy them in your network
i would also recommend that you download and review the microsoft
secure security compliance toolkit specifically there's a section in there
that covers microsoft edge 85. you want to go ahead and download that
and open it up now one of the sections i'd really like you to focus on is the section of extensions
because of the way both chrome and edge are built they rely on extensions to
add flexibility and additional functions that's also a way that malicious users can
insert things into your browser so you want to make sure that if you are a very locked down
environment that you review the extension configuration settings you may want to even
specifically set what extensions can and cannot be installed so review that section and determine
what you want to do in your environment do you want to be somewhat flexible can you be flexible
or do you want to make it very locked down and only have certain extensions installed
another key setting to look at is smart screen settings whether or not you want to configure it
and to block potentially unwanted apps configure the list of domains for which defender won't
trigger warnings or prevent bypassing it again review those settings for your
environment and determine if you need to set specific ways that your your network will
use these settings to get the policy files for edge for business you want to make sure you go
to the edge for business page and the trick is to pick the channel version the platform
and then it lights up the get policy files section so you can then download it
and use it for group policy in your environment
another technology you can investigate is browser isolation
and i don't mean isolating it on your workstation i literally mean
totally isolating that browser from anything else in your environment
and these are cloud-based or remote server-based technologies where you actually have a site that
someone goes to and they browse through that so it's totally air-gapped from your environment
if you have this extreme need for a totally isolated browser there's several vendors
out there web gap is one authenticate is another one there's many out there in the
environment you can look at again if your need is for a totally isolated totally air-gapped
browser environment there's options out there browsing is such a key need in a key way that
ada attackers come into us you want to make sure that you take the time to investigate your options
until next time make sure you check out all the technology topics out on the idg tech
talk youtube channel until next time stay safe stay secure this is susan bradley for cso online