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Posts tagged ‘Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report.’

Jul 1

Analytics Are Empowering Next-Gen Access And Zero Trust Security

Employee identities are the new security perimeter of any business.

80% of IT security breaches involve privileged credential access according to a Forrester study. According to the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report, 89% of organizations are relying on just a single security strategy to keep their mobile networks safe. And with Gartner predicting worldwide security spending reaching $96B this year, up 8% from 2017, it’s evident enterprises must adopt a more vigilant, focused strategy for protecting every threat surface and access point of their companies. IT security strategies based on trusted and untrusted domains are being rendered insufficient as hackers camouflage their attacks through compromised, privileged credentials. It’s happening so often that eight in ten breaches are now the result of compromised employee identities.

Thus, taking a Zero Trust Security (ZTS) approach to ensure every potential threat surface and endpoint, both within and outside a company, is protected, has become vital in today’s dynamic threat landscape. ZTS is an essential strategy for any digital business whose perimeters flex in response to customer demand, are using the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to streamline supply chain and production logistics, and have suppliers, sales teams, support, and services all using mobile apps.  ZTS begins with Next-Gen Access (NGA) by providing companies with the agility they need to secure applications, devices, endpoints, and infrastructure as quickly as needed to support company growth. Both NGA and ZTS are empowered by analytics to anticipate and thwart a wide variety of cyber threats, the most common of which is compromised credential access.

How NGA Leverages Analytics to Secure Every Endpoint

NGA validates every access attempt by capturing and quickly analyzing a wide breadth of data including user identity, device, device operating system, location, time, resource request, and several other factors. As NGA is designed to verify every user and access attempt, it’s foundational to attaining Zero Trust Security across an IT infrastructure. One of the fascinating areas of innovation in enterprise security today is the rapid adoption of analytics and machine learning for verifying users across diverse enterprise networks. NGA platforms calculate and assign a risk score to every access attempt, determining immediately if verified users will get immediate access to resources requested, or be asked to verify their identity further through Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Machine learning-based NGA platforms including Centrify calculate a risk score that quantifies the relative level of trust based on every access attempt across an IT infrastructure. NGA platforms rely on machine learning algorithms to continuously learn and generate contextual intelligence that is used to streamline verified user’s access while thwarting many potential threats ― the most common of which is compromised credentials. IT security teams can combine the insights gained from machine learning, user profiles, and contextual intelligence to fine-tune the variables and attributes that calculate risk scores using cloud-enabled analytics services.  An example of Centrify’s Analytics Services dashboard is shown below:

Visibility and Analytics are a Core Pillar of ZTS

Analytics, machine learning and their combined potential to produce contextual intelligence, real-time risk scores, and secure company perimeters to the individual access attempt level need a continual stream of data to increase their accuracy. Forrester’s Zero Trust Framework, shown below, illustrates how an enterprise-wide ZTS security strategy encompasses workloads, networks, devices, and people.  NGA is the catalyst that makes ZTS scale into each of these areas. It’s evident from the diagram how essential visibility and analytics are to a successful ZTS strategy. NGA provides incident data including reports of anomalous or atypical login and attempted resource behavior. Visibility and analytics applications from IBM, Splunk, Sumologic, and others are relied on to aggregate the data, anticipating and predicting breaches and advanced attacks. The result is a ZTS security strategy that begins with NGA that flexes and scales to the individual perimeter level as a digital business grows.

Source: What ZTX Means For Vendors And Users, Forrester Research Blog, January 23, 2018., Chase Cunningham, Principal Analyst.

Conclusion

Every company, whether they realize it or not, is in a race against time to secure every threat surface that could be compromised and used to steal or destroy data and systems.  Relying on yesterday’s security technologies to protect against tomorrow’s sophisticated, well-orchestrated threats isn’t scaling. Reading through the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report illustrates why Zero Trust Security is the future. Improving visibility throughout the network and reducing the time to breach detection, stopping malware propagation and reducing the scope and cost of internal and regulatory-mandated compliance requirements are just a few of the business benefits. Analytics and machine learning are the fuel enabling NGA to scale and support ZTS strategies’ success today.

Apr 17

83% Of Enterprises Are Complacent About Mobile Security

  • 89% of organizations are relying on just a single security strategy to keep their mobile networks safe.
  • 61% report that their spending on mobile security had increased in 2017 with 10% saying it had increased significantly.
  • Just 39% of mobile device users in enterprises change all default passwords, and only 38% use strong two-factor authentication on their mobile devices.
  • Just 31% of companies are using mobile device or enterprise mobility management (MDM or EMM).

These and many other insights are from the recently published Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report. The report is available here for download (22 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Verizon commissioned an independent research company to complete the survey in the second half of 2017, interviewing over 600 professionals involved in procuring and managing mobile devices for their organizations. Please see page 20 of the study for additional details on the methodology.

The study found that the accelerating pace of cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile adoption is outpacing enterprises’ ability to scale security management, leaving companies vulnerable. When there’s a trade-off between the expediency needed to accomplish business performance goals and security, the business goals win the majority of the time. 32% of enterprises are sacrificing security for expediency and business performance, leaving many areas of their core infrastructure unsecured. Enterprises who made this trade-off of expediency over security were 2.4x as likely to suffer data loss or downtime.

Key takeaways from the study include the following:

  • 79% of enterprises consider their employees to be the most significant security threat. The study points out that it’s not due to losing devices, inadvertent security errors or circumventing security policies. It’s the threat of employees using their secured access for financial or personal gain. 58% of senior management leaders interviewed view employees with secure access as the most significant threat. Security platforms that can stop credential attacks using risk assessment models predicated on behavioral pattern matching and analysis by verifying an employee’s identity are flourishing today. One of the leaders in this field is Centrify, who espouses Zero Trust Security. The following graphic from the study shows the priority of which actors enterprise leaders are most concerned about regarding threats, with employees being the most often mentioned.

  • 32% of enterprises have sacrificed security for expediency and business performance leading to 45% of them suffering data loss or downtime. The study found that companies who sacrificed security were also 2.4x more likely to have experienced data loss or downtime as a result of a mobile-related security incident. For the 68% who prioritized security over expediency, just 19% had suffered data loss or downtime.

  • 89% of enterprises are relying on just a single security practice to keep their mobile networks safe. Verizon’s study found that the majority of enterprises are relying on just one security practice to protect their networks. 55% have two in place, and just 14% have four. Of the four security practices, only 39% change all default passwords. Just under half (47%), encrypt the transmission of sensitive data across open, public networks. The following graphic from the study illustrates the percentage of enterprises who have between 1 and all four security practices in place.

  • Just 49% of enterprises have a policy regarding the use of public Wi‑Fi, and even fewer (47%) encrypt the transmission of sensitive data across open, public networks. A startling high 71% of respondents use public Wi-Fi networks for work tasks, despite their companies prohibiting their use. Taking risks with unsecured Wi-Fi networks for expediency and business performance being done at the expense of security supports a key finding of this study. Nearly one in three (32%) of enterprises are sacrificing security for expediency and business performance, including accessing unsecured Wi-Fi networks. The following infographic from the study explains a few of the many security threats inherent in the design and use of public Wi-Fi networks.

 

Apr 11

How Machine Learning Quantifies Trust & Improves Employee Experiences

Bottom Line: By enabling enterprises to scale security with user behavior-based, contextual intelligence, Next-Gen Access strategies are delivering Zero Trust Security (ZTS) enterprise-wide, enabling the fastest companies to keep growing strong.

Every digital business is facing a security paradox today created by their proliferating amount of applications, endpoints and infrastructure on the one hand and the need to scale enterprise security without reducing the quality of user experiences on the other. Businesses face a continual series of challenges to growth, the majority of which are scale-based. Scaling security takes a multidimensional approach that accurately interprets user behavior, risk and threat predictions, and assesses data use and access patterns.

How Enterprises Are Solving The Security Paradox With Next-Gen Access

Security defies simple, scale-based solutions because its processes are ingrained in many different systems across a company. Each of the many systems security relies on and protects have their cadence, speed, and scale. When a company is growing fast, core systems including accounting, CRM, finance, pricing, sales, services, supply chain and human resources become security-constrained. It’s common for companies experiencing high growth to choose expediency over security. 32% of enterprises are sacrificing security for expediency and business performance, leaving many areas of their core infrastructure unsecured according to the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report.

The hard reality for any growing business is the faster they grow; the more sophisticated and strong they need to become at security. Protecting intellectual property (IP), all data assets and eradicating threats assures uninterrupted, profitable growth. Adding new suppliers, sales teams, distribution partners and service centers can’t be slowed down by legacy-based approaches to user authentication and system access.  The challenge is the faster a business is growing, the slower its legacy approaches to security reacts, slowing down sales cycles, supplier qualifications, and pipelines.

Next-Gen Access solves the security paradox of fast-growing businesses, enabling Zero Trust Security (ZTS) enterprise-wide by solving the following major challenges of a high growth business:

  1. Quit relying on brute-force Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) techniques that deliver mediocre user experiences and slow down productivity. Any company can still attain Zero Trust Security (ZTS) without reverting to brute-force approaches to MFA. Get away from the idea of having MFA challenges be for every user on every device they use to access every resource. Instead look to Next-Gen Access (NGA) to quantify context, device, and behavioral patterns and derive risk scores for each user.
  2. Begin to rely on Next-Gen Access, Risk-Aware MFA, and Risk Scores to quantify trust and set the foundation of a Zero Trust Security (ZTS) enterprise-wide strategies. The goal is to keep growth going strong, uninterrupted by any security event or breach. Next-Gen Access (NGA) provides behavioral, contextual intelligence indexed as a risk score for each user, enabling more secure and efficient user experiences. NGA is built on a platform that includes Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM). They are also the essential components for creating and fine-tuning Zero Trust Security (ZTS) across fast-growing businesses. Taken together in a concerted strategy, ZTS delivers greater control and visibility over every resource in a company.
  3. Identify potential security risks on a per-user basis to the device level and limiting access while asking for identity verification without impacting user experiences. NGA takes contextual and user intelligence into account when deciding which resources will be available to a given user based on their previous login and system use actions and behaviors quantified in their risk score. Machine learning algorithms are used to find patterns in user behavior that could signal a potential security risk. Based on the risk score, conditional access is provided or not. All of this is done in seconds and doesn’t impact the user experience.
  4. Rely on more NGA that learns user’s behavioral patterns over time and improves the user experience, scaling Zero Trust Security enterprise-wide. Solving the paradox of scaling security in fast-growing companies needs to start with a machine learning-based approach to finding and acting on user’s behavioral and contextual activity. As NGA “learns” how valid users interact with security, updating risk scores and performing identity verification, the quality of a user’s experience improves. In fast-growing companies adding new employees, partners, and suppliers, this is invaluable as every new user will generate a risk score. Quantifying trust using NGA, the foundation of any ZTS strategy makes fast, secure profitable growth possible.
  5. The era of ZTS has arrived, and it is accentuating the importance of partnering with security providers who excel at offering Next-Gen Access solutions. ZTS will continue to revolutionize every aspect of an organization’s security strategy, enabling digital businesses to grow faster and more securely over time. Next-Gen Access solutions are the foundations enabling enterprises to scale ZTS strategies across their businesses. Key Next-Gen access providers enabling the era of ZTS include Palo Alto Networks for firewalls and Centrify for Access. Over the next 18 months, ZTS will redefine the cybersecurity landscape as digital businesses look to Next-Gen Access solutions to securely scale their companies and grow.