The Importance of Zero Trust Security treats every user as a potential attacker. It applies the same level of scrutiny to everyone. Whether they are a member of the IT team or a janitor. It is not just to monitor employees, but also contractors and users of the organization’s cloud applications.
According to Gartner’s research, organizations that implement a zero-trust security model have a 20 percent lower chance of being breached than those that do not. This type of security is in areas where there is a high risk of cyber-attack. If a system has a high risk of breach, it should have a high level of security as well.
What Are the Security Risks?
There are many ways our data can be compromised, such as:
Email attachments and links
Malicious software (such as viruses, worms and bots)
Social engineering attacks (phishing)
USB drives and other storage devices that have malware on them from another computer. Hence, also known as “sneakernet.” Or while you are traveling in public (such as at an airport). If you plug your infected USB drive into another computer it will likely infect it too.
How to Protect Yourself?
Disable or delete autorun, which is a feature that allows applications to automatically run on a computer. Even without any user intervention.
Another option is to use disk encryption software such as BitLocker on your computer or FileVault on your Mac. Encrypt your company network drives. So that if anyone steals an employee’s laptop or external hard drive with sensitive data, they won’t be able to access the data without the password.
You can also use network monitoring software. Such as NetFlow Analyzers (like Flowmon) and SIEM solutions (like ArcSight). In order to monitor activity across your network. All of this information is useful if someone leaves the organization. And tries to access data from their old work computer. Or if a malicious insider tries to access data from his old work computer.
Use two-factor authentication
Use two-factor authentication for all critical applications, including email, VPNs, AWS and Azure cloud applications/services/resources that contain sensitive data. Enable encryption for all corporate laptops/PCs but only allow employees to use encrypted laptops/PCs whenever possible. Whenever possible, use end-to-end encryption for business-critical applications. So email is one of the best ways to protect sensitive data from breach attack. Because it prevents attackers from accessing data that they had previously been able to see (email).
Encrypt all removable storage devices such as USB drives with full drive encryption such as BitLocker on Windows PCs or FileVault on Macs before you lose them or leave them in a hotel room/coffee shop etc. Do not store anything confidential on these removable storage devices unless they are encrypted! Use encrypted cloud storage services that allow you to encrypt your data with a key that only you have access to.
Always backup your data to an external hard drive or cloud storage service. In order to protect yourself from ransomware attacks and other malicious software. Especially, from the famous attacks to encrypt the contents of computers and demand a ransom for the decryption key. This is also a good way to recover from cyber-attacks that have caused you to lose some data or even all of your data! Enable full disk encryption and control access to devices by using security policies.