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Posts from the ‘Zero Trust Secuirty’ Category

Mar 10

Gartner Predicts Solid Growth for Information Security, Reaching $287 Billion by 2027

Gartner Predicts Solid Growth for Information Security, Reaching $287 Billion by 2027

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AI continues to become more weaponized with nation-state attackers and cybercrime gangs experimenting with LLMs and gen AI-based attack tradecraft. The age of weaponized LLMs is here.

At the same time, multi-cloud-based infrastructures more businesses rely on are coming under attack. Exfiltrating any identity data available from endpoints and then traversing a network to gain more access by collecting more credential data is often the goal.

Cyberattacks that combine AI and social engineering are just beginning  

Attackers have a version of human-in-the-middle, too, but their goal is to unleash AI’s offensive attack capabilities within social engineering campaigns. Last year’s social engineering-based attacks on MGM, Comcast, Shield Healthcare Group, and others serve as a case in point.

CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report finds that cloud intrusions jumped 75% last year. There was a 76% increase in data theft victims named on data leak sites and a 60% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns. Worse, 75% of attacks were malware-free, making them difficult to identify and stop. There was also a 110% YoY increase in cloud-conscious cases.

PwC’s 2024 Digital Trust Insights Report finds that 97% of senior management teams have gaps in their cloud risk management plans. 47% say cloud attacks are their most urgent threat. One in three senior management teams is prioritizing cloud security as their top investment this year.

Gartner sees a more complex threatscape driving growth

Gartner’s Forecast: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, 2021-2027, 4Q23 Update report predicts the information security and risk management market will grow from $185 billion in 2023 to $287 billion in 2027, attaining a compound annual growth rate of 11% in constant currency.

Nation-state attackers are picking up the pace of their stealthy AI arms race. They’re looking to score offensive first victories on an increasingly active digital battlefield. Gartner predicts that in 2027, 17% of the total cyberattacks and data leaks will involve generative AI.

Another key assumption driving Gartner’s latest forecast is that by 2025, user efficiency improvements will drive at least 35% of security vendors to offer large language model (LLM)-driven chat capabilities for users to interact with their applications and data, up from 1% in 2022.

Gartner has also factored in the surge in cloud attacks and the continued growth of hybrid workforces. One of their key assumptions driving the forecast is that “by the end of 2026, the democratization of technology, digitization, and automation of work will increase the total available market of fully remote and hybrid workers to 64% of all employees, up from 52% in 2021.”

Gartner Predicts Solid Growth for Information Security, Reaching $287 Billion by 2027

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, Published February 29, 2024

Source: Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, Published 29 February 2024

Key takeaways from Gartner’s forecast

Market subsegments predicted to see the most significant growth through 2027 include the following:

  • Gartner has high expectations for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) growth, stating the worldwide market was worth $575.7 million in 2021 and predicting it will soar to $3.99 billion in 2027, attaining a 31.6% CAGR in the forecast period.
  • Identity Access Management (IAM) is predicted to grow from $4 billion in 2021 to $11.1 billion in 2027, attaining a 17.6% CAGR. Identity Governance and Administration software is predicted to grow from $2.8 billion in 2021 to $5.77 billion in 2027, attaining a 12.8% CAGR.
  • Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) are predicted to grow from $9.8 billion in 2021 to $26.9 billion in 2027, achieving a 17.2% CAGR.
  • Threat Intelligence software is predicted to grow from $1.1 billion in 2021 to $2.79 billion in 2027, growing at a 15.6% CAGR through the forecast period.
  • Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) is predicted to grow from $928M in 2021 to $4.75 billion in 2027, attaining a CAGR of 30.2%. Gartner believes that the market share of cloud-native solutions will continue to grow. They are predicting that the combined market for cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and cloud workload protection platforms (CWPPs) will reach $12.8 billion in constant currency by 2027, up from $4.6 billion in 2022. Gartner continues to also see strong demand for cloud-based detection and response solutions that include endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed detection and response (MDR).

May 13

How To Secure Mobile Devices In A Zero Trust World

  • 86% of enterprises are seeing mobile threats growing the fastest this year, outpacing other threat types.
  • 48% say they’ve sacrificed security to “get the job done” up from 32% last year.
  • 41% of those affected say the compromise is having major with lasting repercussions and 43% said that their efforts to remediate the attacks were “difficult and expensive.”

Bottom Line: The majority of enterprises, 67%, are the least confident in the security of their mobile assets than any other device or platform today according to Verizon’s Mobile Security Index 2019.

Why Mobile Devices Are the Fastest Growing Threat Surface Today     

Verizon found that 86% of enterprises see an upswing in the number, scale, and scope of mobile breach attempts in 2019. When broken out by industry, Financial Services, Professional Services, and Education are the most commonly targeted industries as the graphic below shows:

The threat surfaces every organization needs to protect is exponentially increasing today based on the combination of employee- and company-owned mobile devices. 41% of enterprises rate mobile devices as their most vulnerable threat surface this year:

Passwords and Mobile Devices Have Become A Hacker’s Paradise

“The only people who love usernames and passwords are hackers,” said Alex Simons, corporate vice president at Microsoft’s identity division in a recent Wall Street Journal article, Username and Password Hell: Why the Internet Can’t Keep You Logged In. Verizon found that mobile devices are the most vulnerable, fastest-growing threat surface there is, making it a favorite with state-sponsored and organized crime syndicates. How rapidly mobile devices are proliferating in enterprises today frequently outpace their ability to secure them, falling back on legacy Privileged Access Management (PAM) approaches that hacking syndicates know how to get around easily using compromised passwords and privileged access credentials. Here’s proof of how much of a lucrative paradise it is for hackers to target passwords and mobile devices first:

  • Hacker’s favorite way to gain access to any business is by using privileged access credentials, which are increasingly being harvested from cellphones using malware. Hacking organizations would rather walk in the front door of any organizations’ systems rather than expend the time and effort to hack in. It’s by far the most popular approach with hackers, with 74% of IT decision makers whose organizations have been breached in the past say it involved privileged access credential abuse according to a recent Centrify survey, Privileged Access Management in the Modern Threatscape. Only 48% of the organizations have a password vault, and just 21% have multi-factor authentication (MFA) implemented for privileged administrative access. The Verizon study found that malware is the most common strategy hackers use to gain access to corporate networks. MobileIron’s Global Threat Report, mid-year 2018 found that 3.5% of Android devices are harboring known malware. Of these malicious apps, over 80% had access to internal networks and were scanning nearby ports. This suggests that the malware was part of a larger attack.

Securing Mobile Devices In A Zero Trust World Needs To Happen Now

Mobile devices are an integral part of everyone’s identity today. They are also the fastest growing threat surface for every business – making identities the new security perimeter. Passwords are proving to be problematic in scaling fast enough to protect these threat surfaces, as credential abuse is skyrocketing today. They’re perennial best-sellers on the Dark Web, where buyers and sellers negotiate in bitcoin for companies’ logins and passwords – often with specific financial firms, called out by name in “credentials wanted” ads. Organizations are waking up to the value of taking a Zero Trust approach to securing their businesses, which is a great start. Passwords are still the most widely relied-on security mechanism – and continue to be the weakest link in today’s enterprise security.  That needs to change. According to the Wall Street Journal, the World Wide Web Consortium has recently ratified a standard called WebAuthN, which allows websites to authenticate users with biometric information, or physical objects like security keys, and skip passwords altogether.

MobileIron is also taking a unique approach to this challenge by introducing zero sign-on (ZSO), built on the company’s unified endpoint management (UEM) platform and powered by the MobileIron Access solution. “By making mobile devices your identity, we create a world free from the constant pains of password recovery and the threat of data breaches due to easily compromised credentials,” wrote Simon Biddiscombe, MobileIron’s President and Chief Executive Officer in his recent blog post, Single sign-on is still one sign-on too many. Simon’s latest post MobileIron: We’re making history by making passwords history, provides the company’s vision going forward with ZSO. Zero sign-on eliminates passwords as the primary method for user authentication, unlike single sign-on, which still requires at least one username and password. MobileIron paved the way for a zero sign-on enterprise with its Access product in 2017, which enabled zero sign-on to cloud services on managed devices.

Conclusion

Mobile devices are the most quickly proliferating threat surface there are today and an integral part of everyone’s identities as well. Thwarting the many breach attempts attempted daily over mobile devices and across all threat surfaces needs to start with a solid Zero Trust framework. MobileIron’s introduction of zero sign-on (ZSO) eliminates passwords as the method for user authentication, replacing single sign-on, which still requires at least one username and password. ZSO is exactly what enterprises need to secure the proliferating number of mobile devices they rely on to operate and grow in a Zero Trust world.

Apr 6

Five Ways Machine Learning Can Save Your Company From A Security Breach Meltdown

  • $86B was spent on security in 2017, yet 66% of companies have still been breached an average of five or more times.
  • Just 55% of CEOs say their organizations have experienced a breach, while 79% of CTOs acknowledge breaches have occurred. One in approximately four CEOs (24%) aren’t aware if their companies have even had a security breach.
  • 62% of CEOs inaccurately cite malware as the primary threat to cybersecurity.
  • 68% of executives whose companies experienced significant breaches in hindsight believe that the breach could have been prevented by implementing more mature identity and access management strategies.

These and many other fascinating findings are from the recently released Centrify and Dow Jones Customer Intelligence study, CEO Disconnect is Weakening Cybersecurity (31 pp, PDF, opt-in).

One of the most valuable findings from the study is how CEOs can reduce the risk of a security breach meltdown by rethinking their core cyber defense strategy by maturing their identity and access management strategies.

However, 62% of CEOs have the impression that multi-factor authentication is difficult to manage. Thus, their primary security concern is primarily driven by how to avoid delivering poor user experiences. In this context, machine learning can assist in strengthening the foundation of a multi-factor authentication platform to increase effectiveness while streamlining user experiences.

Five Ways Machine Learning Saves Companies From Security Breach Meltdowns

Machine learning is solving the security paradox all enterprises face today. Spending millions of dollars on security solutions yet still having breaches occur that are crippling their ability to compete and grow, enterprises need to confront this paradox now. There are many ways machine learning can be used to improve enterprise security. With identity being the primary point of attacks, the following are five ways machine learning can be leveraged in the context of identity and access management to minimize the risk of falling victim to a data breach.

  1. Thwarting compromised credential attacks by using risk-based models that validate user identity based on behavioral pattern matching and analysis. Machine learning excels at using constraint-based and pattern matching algorithms, which makes them ideal for analyzing behavioral patterns of people signing in to systems that hold sensitive information. Compromised credentials are the most common and lethal type of breach. Applying machine learning to this challenge by using a risk-based model that “learns’ behavior over time is stopping security breaches today.
  2. Attaining Zero Trust Security (ZTS) enterprise-wide using risk scoring models that flex to a businesses’ changing requirements. Machine learning enables Zero Trust Security (ZTS) frameworks to scale enterprise-wide, providing threat assessments and graphs that scale across every location. These score models are invaluable in planning and executing growth strategies quickly across broad geographic regions. CEOs need to see multi-factor authentication as a key foundation of ZTS frameworks that can help them grow faster. Machine learning enables IT to accelerate the development of Zero Trust Security (ZTS) frameworks and scale them globally. Removing security-based roadblocks that get in the way of future growth needs to be the highest priority CEOs address. A strong ZTS framework is as much a contributor to revenue as is any distribution or selling channel.
  3. Streamlining security access for new employees by having persona-based risk model profiles that can be quickly customized by IT for specific needs. CEOs most worry about security’s poor user experience and its impacts on productivity. The good news is that the early multi-factor authentication workflows that caused poor user experiences are being redefined with contextual insights and intelligence based on more precise persona-based risk scoring models. As the models “learn” the behaviors of employees regarding access, the level of authentication changes and the experience improves. By learning new behavior patterns over time, machine learning is accelerating how quickly employees can gain access to secured services and systems.
  4. Provide predictive analytics and insights into which are the most probable sources of threats, what their profiles are and what priority to assign to them. CIOs and the security teams they manage need to have enterprise-wide visibility of all potential threats, ideally prioritized by potential severity. Machine learning algorithms are doing this today, providing threat assessments and defining which are the highest priority threats that CIOs and their teams need to address.
  5. Stop malware-based breaches by learning how hackers modify the code bases in an attempt to bypass multi-factor authentication. One of the favorite techniques for hackers to penetrate an enterprise network is to use impersonation-based logins and passwords to pass malware onto corporate servers. Malware breaches can be extremely challenging to track. One approach that is working is when enterprises implement a ZTS framework and create specific scenarios to trap, stop and destroy suspicious malware activity.