Zero Trust Privilege For Dummies

Cyber breaches are bigger and worse than ever. Hardly a day goes by without headlines about some new devastating cyber-attack. To better protect against data breaches, the use of a Zero Trust model has returned to the spotlight and seen huge growth in adoption. Instead of using the traditional approach of “trust, but verify,” the Zero Trust model implements “never trust, always verify” as its guiding principle.

There are many starting points on the path to Zero Trust. However, all roads still lead to identity, and access controls are the lowest-hanging fruit. Hackers don’t hack in anymore — they log in using weak, default, stolen, or otherwise compromised credentials. Indeed, Forrester Research estimates that 80 percent of today’s breaches involve privileged access abuse — that is, user accounts that have administrative access to critical systems in the organization. So, until organizations start implementing identity-centric security measures, privileged account compromise attacks will continue to provide a perfect camouflage for data breaches.

 

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