Malicious insiders

Malicious insiders—referred to as “Turncloaks”—use their privileged access to a network to deliberately cause harm to your organisation. They could engage in corporate espionage, sell sensitive information to third parties/competitors, and steal intellectual property for financial or personal gains. Turncloaks usually take the form of an opportunistic employee, former disgruntled employee or contractor who has legitimate access to your network. Malicious insiders have an advantage over other attackers because they are familiar with your organisation's security policies and procedures. Zero trust negates the privilege enjoyed by malicious actors on traditional networks based on implicit trust, and couples low-priority privilege with end-point monitoring to ensure users only have an adequate level to carry out their official tasks.

Careless insiders

With no deliberate intention of causing harm or losses to the organisation, the actions of careless insiders unknowingly expose critical information and your network to outside threats. Such as when an employee mistakenly opens an insecure link that infects the system with malware. Careless insider threats are fairly common and are often the results of human error, such as staff unintentionally leaving devices connected to the organisation exposed or falling victim to a scam or phishing attack. The protection offered through zero trust ensures that the user's identity is continually authenticated and monitored, mitigating the risk of outside actors gaining access to your organisation’s sensitive information.

Moles

A mole is technically an external actor, who has managed to gain insider and privileged access to your organisation’s network. Posing as an insider and staying undetected among legitimate users. Moles typically pose as employees, vendors, contractors, or partners within your network, thereby gaining privileged authorisation and access within the system that they would otherwise not qualify for. Zero trust secures your network from moles by impeding their ability to blend in and remain undetected, as all devices, endpoints and identities are continually verified—preventing unauthorised access and alerting your organisation to the threat.

Protects your organisation from both internal and external threats

The cybersecurity of businesses is constantly threatened by insider threats such as activations of Trojans, malware, and phishing attacks and external threats such as hackers trying to defeat endpoint protection to infiltrate networks. Therefore in protecting organisations from cyberattacks, the ability to not trust any connection without proper verification is essential given the amount of cloud, endpoint, and data sprawl in the current configuration of networks in most organisations. As zero trust architecture operates on baseline standards of activity, any deviation automatically triggers an alert which is then analysed for potential malicious activity. This helps in the overall reduction of risk exposure.

Secures privacy while keeping sensitive corporate information hidden

At present, cloud environments can be attractive targets for cybercriminals aiming to target, copy, steal, or destroy business-critical and sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information, intellectual property, and financial information—generally with a motive of demanding a ransom from the organisation or to disrupt its operation. Commonly referred to as data exfiltration, it can be carried out remotely or manually and can be extremely difficult to detect as it often resembles business-justified network access. In a zero-trust environment as all activities are closely monitored, data exfiltration will trigger an alert and be investigated as an anomaly—securing the sensitive data held within your organisation.

Increases visibility and security related to all user access

The emergence of remote working environments has resulted in increased digitisation and rapid cloud adoption, enabling employees to collaborate on tasks from anywhere using any device. Such a scattered workforce ecosystem demands the correlation of a real-time security context spanning across all security domains of an organisation. Adaptive identity-based access control forms the essence of zero trust cloud architecture, this continuous and adaptive adjustment of authority based on trust levels helps to form a dynamic and closed security loop. As this provides enhanced visibility to all data access activities, all data and systems are better secured. With data monitoring at the core of zero trust architecture, you have full visibility of who accesses your data including the time and location of access. This will help the security system of your organisation to flag any unwanted behaviours or entries to the data rapidly.