Nathan Burke, CMO at cybersecurity asset management startup Axonius, wrote a blog post at about 4 a.m. a couple weekends ago, and its title captures the current mood: Things will be weird in cybersecurity for a while.

His blog linked to free, online cybersecurity classes, news sites, and tips on how companies can beef up their remote-worker security. And it also included educational resources and online learning sites for kids, who are now being homeschooled by working parents, as well as links to COVID-19 relief funds and charities.

As the coronavirus spread and companies across the globe closed their doors and told employees to work from home, security vendors also had to enable their own staff to work remotely. But in addition to their own organizations, their customers have new challenges and potential vulnerabilities that they want security vendors to fix. “On the cybersecurity practitioner side, we’ve had customers tell us everyone dropped everything, grabbed their machine, and started working from home,” Burke said.

So, the following Monday after Burke posted his blog, he asked his team “what can we do to make this bigger and more useful?” And CybersecurityCares was born. It’s a clearinghouse of sorts for free cybersecurity tools (some that are always free and some commercial products and services that only free during the pandemic), online webinars and other events, data and worker protection tips, learning tools for kids, and a curated list of charitable organizations fighting COVID-19.

Axonius Chief Information Security Officer Lenny Zeltser suggested hosting a day of free (but with a suggested donation to charities listed on CybersecurityCares) 10-minute lightning talks from security gurus where the experts have to give listeners at least one piece of actionable advice. Burke says that’s in the works, too.

It’s free to join, and anyone can suggest informational resources and/or security products and services for inclusion on the site. But these cannot be “thinly veiled marketing stunts,” Burke said. This can be a fine line, however, with vendors pitching all kinds of free security offers during the pandemic.

Burke says he posed the question to a customer in the health care sector, and the customer said a legitimate security tool needs to have two things to differentiate it from a marketing campaign. “I can’t have any infrastructure change, and there has to be no friction in ripping this thing out at the end” of the pandemic, the customer told him. “Those are the guidelines I’ve had in my head. If it really is free, it has to be something that if I put it in, then I can pull it out. Can I get rid of it without a hassle at the end? Also, it has to be something I can use right away.”

In other words, sandboxing won’t cut it in this environment.

When it comes to securing a remote workforce, “there’s two sides to that coin,” Burke said. “There’s all the people who are now working from home, and looking at their devices, and making sure they are using authentication providers and agents on those machines.”

The second piece involves securing the network now that the security team is remote. “I’m no longer in the building, but boy do I want to know anything that shows up on my segmented network now that I’m not there.”

At press time, the list of always-free products on CybersecurityCares includes ransomware protection from Emisoft, an anti-phishing tool from GoPhish, and open source network control from PacketFence.

Additionally, free-for-now commercial products to help secure remote teams include Axonius’ cybersecurity risk assessment and related services for health care teams; endpoint protection platforms from CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Morphisec; Cymulate’s email, web, and endpoint security assessments, GreatHorn’s phishing risk tool; virtual private network (VPN) access and licenses from Meno Security and Tempered; Snyk’s cloud-native application security for healthcare, hospitality, travel, and entertainment companies; Vera Security’s toolkit; and Vectra’s Amazon Web Services and Microsoft 365 cloud security product.