Major VPN Flaw

Do you remember Heartbleed?

A major security vulnerability affecting hundreds of thousands of websites, Heartbleed was not just another virus – it was a flaw. A mistake allowing hackers to extract massive amounts of information off the VPN connection:

• User Names
• Passwords
• Other sensitive data.

SSL allows information to be securely transmitted between you and a server without the threat of a third party intercepting the information. OpenSSL is the open-source implementation of SSL. Many online businesses used OpenSSL, as it was considered to be one of the more secure ways to transmit data.

For this to work, your computer needs to communicate to a server. It sends out a “heartbeat” which sends a signal to a server to see if it is online. If the server is online, it returns the signal to your computer. Both your computer and the server send out heartbeats on regular intervals to ensure that both you and the server remain online.

The flaw, named Heartbleed, leaked memory content from clients and servers during the exchange. A VPN-targeting hacker took advantage of this “heartbeat” by maliciously changing the signal to servers. Instead of a return signal, the server diverted memory to the user who had sent the tainted heartbeat. Once connected to the VPN network, the hacker was free to intrude upon many more active sessions and escalate the attack.

Impact for Current VPN Users?

VPN Servers still pose core security problems. Developers wrote the code for using VPN servers and as we learned from Heartbleed, developers make mistakes.

Any connection from this network exposes you to more attacks whether from future attacks or from vulnerable systems that have not been patched yet.

MyWorkDrive as a Solution

Our Cloud ConnectorAgent hides the topology and characteristics of your back-end servers by removing the need for direct internet access to them, with a reverse proxy. Only the required ports to access the SSL user portal are available in the cloud for your users.

A proxy server is a server that forwards content requests from multiple clients to different servers across the Internet. A reverse proxy is between a client and a server in a private network and from behind a firewall. The proxy handles incoming requests and it directs them to the appropriate back-end server. When combined with the cloud, a reverse proxy gives you all the benefits of the cloud without compromising control or security.

This additional level of control between clients and servers is gained by utilizing the best features of using the MyWorkDrive Cloud ConnectorAgent.

MyWorkDrive acts as a VPN Replacement.

Security

By intercepting requests to back-end servers, your identity is protected and you have an additional defense against security attacks.

Load Balancing

Load balancers are crucial to networks that receive large volumes of requests. Placed in front of back-end servers, ConnectorAgent distributes requests across a cluster of servers. This maximizes speed and capacity and ensures no single server is overloaded, which can degrade performance. In the event that a server does go down, the load balancer redirects traffic to the remaining servers.

Web Acceleration (Reverse Proxies)

Our Cloud ConnectorAgent uses intelligent compression and caching for commonly requested content. Additionally, taking on tasks such as SSL encryption further reduce the load on servers and enables optimum performance.

With My Work Drive, you get all the benefits of the cloud without sacrificing privacy and security.