Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

What was once the thing of spy movies and industrial espionage news headlines is now, sadly, a common occurrence for public organizations and private enterprises around the globe. Insiders… employees, consultants, partners… have emerged as one of the most immediate and serious threats facing IT and cyber security teams and practitioners today. It is not however because every insider has turned malicious.

Zero Trust is a security model — a strategy for protecting an organization’s IT assets, including data, services and applications. The Zero Trust model is built upon research more than a decade ago by analysts at Forrester, and it is now recommended by many security experts and vendors, including Microsoft. Zero Trust is a security architecture model that requires no implicit trust to be given in any quarter.

In early 2020, almost every government agency embraced telework in response to the pandemic. With telework, employees operate outside the security perimeter that was put in place to protect them and the agency’s data. As a result, telework has had significant cybersecurity ramifications. Lookout has a long history of collaborating with the public sector to secure agency employees.

Cyber attacks, like the pandemic that has spurred the rise in incidents, have been relentless. Over the past eight months, there has been a significant escalation as the sophistication of these attacks has risen. Hackers are going after key vendors, allowing them to target wide swaths of valuable victims like we have seen in the attacks on SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, Colonial Pipeline, and more recently, MSP software provider Kaseya.

In the past year, IT services have gone through a world of change. There are more remote workers, hybrid work models, cloud services, and mobile devices. It is finally safe to say that the classic perimeter no longer exists. In fact, you might go one step further and say that identity is the new perimeter. The ability for end-users to access any applications from any device from anywhere has put securing identities and their access privileges near the top of any Zero Trust security strategy.