President Biden’s Executive Order 14028 to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and protect federal government networks, was released more than half a year ago. At the time, one of the most exciting aspects about it was the multiple uses of the term “zero trust,” as Netskope discussed in a blog at the time. However, it’s clear that federal agencies are still working out the specifics of how to actually approach implementing zero trust.
On May 12, The White House published its Executive Order (EO) on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. The directive outlined a set of focus areas intended to improve cybersecurity for the federal government and critical infrastructure sectors including information sharing, supply chain security, endpoint detection and response, and cloud security.
Zero trust is everywhere, and it will change the way we undertake security. Just as zero trust concepts are shaping the data center and our networks, they will shape cloud environments, as well. Many of the challenges of cloud security arose because we moved workloads to the cloud with no clear idea of how to secure them. Zero trust provides exactly those ideas.
In a previous blog post, I discussed the different applications of integrity for Zero Trust and provided four use cases highlighting integrity in action. The reality is that many organizations can’t realize any of this on their own. But they don’t need to. They can work with a company like Tripwire as a partner on their Zero Trust journey. Let’s explore how they can do this below.
In September 2021, Tripwire released its annual report to examine the actions taken by the U.S. federal government to improve cybersecurity. The report also looks at non-government organizations so that we may catch a glimpse of the differing views and approaches of each, which makes for interesting (and revealing) insights.
The onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about many changes and disruptions in cybersecurity. Organizations globally shifted to remote work scenarios to enable their employees to work from the comfort of their homes. Since this was a sudden decision, many organizations lacked resources to ensure security while users were operating from locations across the world. These redefined security perimeters provided leeway for bad actors to perform cyberattacks.
COVID-19 made moving agency employees and services off-premises essential. This move, however, has also sparked one of the biggest waves of cybercrime the internet has ever seen. Ransomware attacks have been particularly effective against government agencies and critical infrastructure.
