Zero Trust | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Traditional perimeter-based security has become costly and ineffective. As a result, communications security between people, systems, and networks is more important than blocking access with firewalls.  On top of that, most cybersecurity risks are caused by just a few superusers – typically one out of 200 users.  There's a company aiming to fix the gap between traditional PAM and IdM solutions and secure your one out of 200 users –  SSH Communications Security.   Your Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Management (IdM) should work hand in hand to secure your users' access and identities – regular users and privileged users alike. But traditional solutions struggle to achieve that.  Microsoft Entra manages all identities and basic-level access. With increasing criticality of targets and data, the session duration decreases, and additional protection is necessary. That's where SSH Communications Security helps Let's look at what organizations need to understand about

Incident response (IR) is a race against time. You engage your internal or external team because there's enough evidence that something bad is happening, but you're still blind to the scope, the impact, and the root cause. The common set of IR tools and practices provides IR teams with the ability to discover malicious files and outbound network connections. However, the identity aspect - namely the pinpointing of compromised user accounts that were used to spread in your network - unfortunately remains unattended. This task proves to be the most time-consuming for IR teams and has become a challenging uphill battle that enables attackers to earn precious time in which they can still inflict damage.  In this article, we analyze the root cause of the identity of IR blind spots and provide sample IR scenarios in which it acts as an inhibitor to a rapid and efficient process. We then introduce Silverfort's Unified Identity Protection Platform and show how its real-time MFA and ident

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Picture this: you stumble upon a concealed secret within your company's source code. Instantly, a wave of panic hits as you grasp the possible consequences. This one hidden secret has the power to pave the way for unauthorized entry, data breaches, and a damaged reputation. Understanding the secret is just the beginning; swift and resolute action becomes imperative. However, lacking the necessary context, you're left pondering the optimal steps to take. What's the right path forward in this situation? Secrets management is an essential aspect of any organization's security strategy. In a world where breaches are increasingly common, managing sensitive information such as API keys, credentials, and tokens can make all the difference. Secret scanners play a role in identifying exposed secrets within source code, but they have one significant limitation:  they don't provide context. And without context, it's impossible to devise an appropriate response plan. Con

Operational technology (OT) cybersecurity is a challenging but critical aspect of protecting organizations' essential systems and resources. Cybercriminals no longer break into systems, but instead log in – making access security more complex and also more important to manage and control than ever before. In an effort to solve the access-related challenges facing OT and critical infrastructure operators, the team at Cyolo built a zero-trust access platform designed to meet the unique safety, security, and uptime requirements of OT and industrial control systems (ICS) environments. Let's look under the hood:  The Cyolo solution is a high-powered combination of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Identity Provider (IdP), and Privileged Access Management (PAM). What makes this approach stand out from the pack is that other ZTNA solutions do not offer IdP or PAM capabilities, while Identity and Access Management tools (IdPs and PAMs) do not extend connectivity. And unlike other pl

For cybersecurity professionals, it is a huge challenge to separate the "good guys" from the "villains". In the past, most cyberattacks could simply be traced to external cybercriminals, cyberterrorists, or rogue nation-states.  But not anymore . Threats from within organizations – also known as "insider threats" – are increasing and cybersecurity practitioners are feeling the pain.  Traditional perimeter defenses are not designed to prevent these attacks. They also struggle to keep  external  attackers out. Clever hackers continuously find ways in and "weaponize" their trusted status inside the network to compromise sensitive assets and orchestrate larger attacks. And an increasing number of enterprise resources – applications, devices, data, and even people – now live outside the perimeter. It's difficult to protect these assets with legacy approaches, much less fortify the perimeter to keep attackers out completely. How can you protect your organization in this landscape? The

In any organization, there are certain accounts that are designated as being privileged. These privileged accounts differ from standard user accounts in that they have permission to perform actions that go beyond what standard users can do. The actions vary based on the nature of the account but can include anything from setting up new user accounts to shutting down mission-critical systems. Privileged accounts are essential tools. Without these accounts, the IT staff would be unable to do its job. At the same time, privileged accounts can pose a serious threat to an organization's security. Added risk of a privileged account  Imagine for a moment that a hacker manages to steal a standard user's password and is able to log in as that user. Even though the hacker would have access to certain resources at that point, they would be constrained by the user's privileges (or lack thereof). In other words, the hacker would be able to browse the Internet, open some applications, and access

With just about everything delivered from the cloud these days, employees can now collaborate and access what they need from anywhere and on any device. While this newfound flexibility has changed the way we think about productivity, it has also created new cybersecurity challenges for organizations. Historically, enterprise data was stored inside data centers and guarded by perimeter-based security tools. But with users using endpoints and networks your IT teams don't manage, this approach has become antiquated. To combat this new reality, organizations have turned to tactics such as relying on device management and antivirus software, as well as single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. Some vendors have even begun to claim these measures as a form of  Zero Trust , a popular idea where organizations should not trust any entity and provide access to its applications and data until its risk levels are verified. In this blog, I will break down what is and what isn't Zero Trust

Over the last several years, there have been numerous high-profile security breaches. These breaches have underscored the fact that traditional cyber defenses have become woefully inadequate and that stronger defenses are needed. As such, many organizations have transitioned toward a zero trust security model. A zero trust security model is based on the idea that no IT resource should be trusted implicitly. Prior to the introduction of zero trust security, a user who authenticated into a network was trustworthy for the duration of their session, as was the user's device. In a zero trust model, a user is no longer considered to be trustworthy just because they entered a password at the beginning of their session. Instead, the user's identity is verified through multi-factor authentication, and the user may be prompted to re-authenticate if they attempt to access resources that are particularly sensitive or if the user attempts to do something out of the ordinary. How Complic

Every once in a while, an industry term will get overused by marketing to the point of becoming a cliche. "Zero Trust" may have reached this threshold. In some ways, we understand why this is happening. Security perimeters have become obsolete as people use mobile devices and cloud applications to work from anywhere. Zero Trust deployment — moving all your apps and data to the cloud and assuming no user or device is trustworthy until proven otherwise in order to gain access — has been rapidly introduced as a result of the pandemic. However, most attempts at achieving Zero Trust access today are a patchwork of disparate products from different vendors connected to virtual private networks (VPN), with rudimentary on-off access controls based on limited visibility. Cloud security company,  Lookout , believes a modern approach to Zero Trust needs to take into account the fact that data has moved to the cloud and users are working from anywhere, on any device, and connecting o

Forget watercooler conspiracies or boardroom battles. There's a new war in the office. As companies nudge their staff to return to communal workspaces, many workers don't actually want to – more than 50 percent of employees would rather quit, according to  research by EY .  While HR teams worry over the hearts and minds of staff, IT security professionals have a different battle plan to draft – how to make the new normal of the hybrid workplace secure. The Trade-off Between Usability and Security A company's biggest vulnerability continues to be its people. In a hybrid workplace, a Zero Trust strategy means ever-tightening security.  The MFA a company chooses  affects the difficulty of logging into email, dashboards, workflow tools, client documentation, and so on. Or, conversely, how porous access security is.  Now imagine this scenario. An employee opens a company portal, confirms a prompt on a company app on her phone, and that's it. She has been authenticated s