No authentication? Like, none at all?

I’m a huge fan of Security Park.  I don’t know if you subscribe to it or not, but it’s a security news outlet in the UK.  I happen to like it because they cover both physical and information security and the physical side is something most of the other outlets don’t cover.

Anyway, today I came across a post over there where they were covering some data that was just put out by GrIDsure that I thought was a little unusual.  It’s survey data about remote access:

46% of business professionals worked remotely this summer… 15% with suitable jobs wishing to, but prevented…  68% of business professionals considered remote working to be a strong factor for enjoying or choosing their job…  main difficulties with remote working cited were problems with network speeds (26%) and concerns around work data being stolen (16%). 9% of respondents found it difficult to login to their PC because of problems with their password or smart-token…

et cetera.  It’d be just another survey except for this: “44% of business professionals connected to their office network using a business computer… of which 18.5% did not have any form of network login”.   Which threw me for a loop and left me scratching my head going, “Like… none?   No login?  No authentication at all?”

Can that be right?  The folks at Security Park (rightly) latched on to this and ran with the title, “Large proportion of remote users access their networks without any for [sic] form of authentication”.

I’m suspicious of this. I’m not going to question the data without knowing the methodology and the questions they asked, but I wasn’t sure there were still remote access solutions on the market that allow authentication-free access (unless maybe you’re using an ancient copy of something like PC Anywhere).  But hey… maybe I’m just out of the loop.

Anyway, I’m interested to see if the folks at GrIDsure publish this in a report – I’m anxious to know what question they asked that led to folks responding in this way.