Trust no one: A better way to close the security gap?

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://gcn.com/articles/2015/08/19/zero-trust-security.aspx

By Paul McCloskey
GCN.com
Aug 19, 2015

Agencies are increasingly turning to predictive analytics to root out 
fraud, but those aren’t the only tools being used to spot and control 
anomalous behavior. New identity security tools are emerging to help 
enterprises that might be victimized in fraud schemes enabled by insiders 
or attackers using insider credentials. Those users have been at the 
center of several recent high-profile attacks. Their privileges were 
exploited as the result of sophisticated spear-phishing attacks, including 
the one on health insurer Anthem earlier this year in which 80 million 
records were stolen.

“These are privileged users with access to everything in the database — 
not just their records; they have the ability to go from system to system 
inside a corporate or government infrastructure,” said Ken Ammon, chief 
strategy officer at Xceedium.

 “What happens is criminals target those individuals because they know 
their roles or their accounts are extremely powerful in the organization,” 
Ammon said. “If they can send them an email that they might click on, it 
installs as a super user who now can download the entire corporate 
database from network to network.”

To help defend against that vulnerability, Xceedium has embraced a policy 
of “zero trust,” whereby access is extended only for a specific reason and 
for a specific amount of time.

[...]

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