Principles of Zero Trust
Today's work environment looks different than it did many years ago when all workers performed jobs in similar office spaces. These days, jobs are performed on site, remotely, in the cloud, or hybridly (a combination of on-site and remote work).
Cybercriminals, on the other hand, haven't changed that much. They still look for ways to take advantage of any lapses in security, and they use social engineering to prey on the human weakness of wanting to trust others. Cybercriminals establish trust in their cyberattacks and then use that trust to defraud their victims.
Zero Trust is the best defense against cyberattacks and threats. Zero Trust uses the premise of "never trust, always verify" and requires that all users with access to data authenticate, authorize, and validate before accessing system resources.
Zero Trust is an end-to-end security strategy that monitors and controls the six main pillars of security:
- Identity
- Endpoints
- Applications
- Network
- Infrastructure
- Data
In today's ever-changing digital landscape of cloud applications, data stored in different environments, and devices that connect from various locations, the practice of "trust no one and verify everything" is paramount to avoid a major security breach.
The following three Zero Trust principles provide multiple layers of defense:
- Verify explicitly – Strict identity verification for every user and every device trying to access system resources, ensuring constant monitoring, and validating who can access what.
- Use least privilege access – Just-in-Time (JIT) and Just-Enough-Access (JEA) ensure that access is minimized, only granting system and application access to authorized users for specific tasks and limited times.
- Assume breach – Assumes attackers have already breached the system and embodies a deny-all approach with real-time monitoring to assess every request against known behaviors, creating a mindset of necessary access segregation to minimize damage.