The myth of a safe environment behind a firewall is dangerous.įirst of all, the network could already have been a victim of a breach that might have gone unnoticed. Unfortunately, depending on this data alone is not enough, as 30% of breaches imply internal actors. IP addresses help to determine that a user is requesting access from a “trusted network”.
This includes devices that were rooted or jailbroken due to a suspicion of installed malware, but also professional hardware.Īs a result, legitimate users on infected devices can, without realising it, expose sensitive resources to hackers through their own business network access.
From that moment on, if an employee’s login details are recovered, anyone who has them can use them and connect “securely” without being detected.Īccording to the 2019 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, 1 out of 36 devices used in companies are likely to be infected. Phishing campaigns are often launched on a company-wide basis. However, trusting any user who could have access to a network weakens the security of a business. This process, known as backhauling, reinforces the myth that perimeter-based security was initially effective. Remote work, the adoption of the cloud and other trends are speeding up in all businesses and are creating more and more scenarios in which only the connection established from a so-called “secure” IP address is sufficient to access the company’s network (e.g. With sources of attacks being more and more diverse, it is now better to assume that an internal network is as dangerous as the public internet. The implicit trust based on the network perimeter has become insufficient. In order to address the issue of “homemade” security and adapt to the new digital landscape, businesses must adopt a new security philosophy: the idea of zero trust. The ideas of this perimeter security model no longer work: the perimeter is not only the business’ physical place anymore, and it is no longer a protected and secure place to house data. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic which made remote work the new normal for the majority of businesses, the widespread usage of mobile phones, clouds and other advanced technologies expanded businesses beyond their perimeter, which made new sources of attacks emerge. Technological evolution has made the presumption of trust not only problematic but also unnecessary. If the firewall is put in danger, the entire internal network is exposed. The same goes for traditional IT networks. Whoever manages to cross the drawbridge will have access to the castle’s resources. Everything outside of the wall is considered dangerous, whereas everything inside the wall is reliable.
Traditional IT security is often compared to a medieval castle with a thick-walled fortress surrounded by a moat, with a single, heavily-guarded entry and exit point. A loss of one million data files costs roughly 25 million dollars. IT security is one of the central issues for business leaders around the world. Read this article to better understand the different components of this new security paradigm.Īrticle written by Victor de Coninck, Cloud Security Engineer at Devoteam G Cloud The zero trust concept In this article, we’ll introduce the zero trust concept and its implementation by Google: BeyondCorp. Understanding current security issues is essential to carry out relevant transformation projects.