Q2 Cyber Threat Report: Ransomware Season Arrives Early
In this report, our threat intel team highlights our critical cyber threat and ransomware findings from Q2 2024 and what it means for the threat landscape.
Traditional VPN solutions provide users remote access to an organization's private resources over an encrypted channel. VPN’s gained popularity because they allowed employees to work from anywhere - and the flexibility that VPNs offered led to its rapid adoption. However, the increase in user devices, remote work, and cloud-hosted applications have highlighted that traditional remote access technologies are becoming difficult to manage and introduce security risks.
This can allow for unauthorized devices to connect to the environment.
Unpatched VPN Solutions are targeted by attackers and used as a point of entry to carry out an attack. Because VPN devices sit on the edge of the network, vulnerabilities in these devices can lead to the total compromise of an environment.
VPNs provided organizations a remote access solution when alternatives to remote desktop was needed. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) aims to build upon the foundations of remote access that VPN’s taught us. These fundamental challenges are overcome by incorporating key concepts of zero trust.
ZTNA is a category of security technologies that provides secure remote access to applications and services. Access is established after a user has been authenticated to the ZTNA service, which acts as an access broker. The ZTNA service then provides access to permitted applications on the user’s behalf through a secure, encrypted tunnel. Users are then only allowed access to certain applications and areas of a network that have been authorized for their user account.
ZTNA operates under one simple principle: never trust, always verify. At a high level, the zero trust security model requires that a user should only have access and permissions to systems, applications and data required to fulfill their role. This is known as the principle of least privilege, and a ZTNA solution will automatically default access to the lowest level for all users.
Only allow the users and devices that are confirmed to be legitimate.
Only allow approved users and devices to access applications they are approved to access.
Full visibility for security teams to rapidly investigate suspicious activity.
The obscurity makes it difficult for an attacker to plan their next attack and decreases your external footprint.
This also allows for quick investigations that lead to swift containment and reduces the blast radius of an attack against an organization or a compromise of a user's credentials.
Device connections are immediately terminated when a risk is detected. ZTNAs can also be integrated with an endpoint security solution to allow adaptive access based on a continuous assessment of a device's security posture.
___________________________________________________________________
Additional Information: