Zero trust has been applied in cybersecurity for over a decade.
When done right, it can prevent data breaches and other damaging malicious hacking activity.
Still, there are many misunderstandings about what it entails exactly and how to apply it to decrease the number of cyber incidents.
Many people still believe that zero trust means:
- Not trusting your general workforce — when it, in fact, it protects both employees and the company
- Negatively affecting user experience due to continual verification of identity — when some zero-trust-based products can make all the difference between high and low-risk behaviors
Even more, there is a lot of confusion regarding the implementation of zero trust.
Generally, zero trust is a framework, but there are concrete security solutions that allow businesses to put this strategy into practice.
One way to apply this principle for a more secure network is with ZTNA or Zero Trust Access Network.
What is ZTNA exactly, and how does it prevent hackers from gaining illicit access to the company’s systems?
What Is ZTNA?
Short for Zero Trust Access Network, ZTNA applies the “trust but verify” methodology to prevent cyber incidents such as data breaches.
Its main function is limiting access to certain users — the ones it deems untrustworthy even if they have the correct credentials. This decreases the chance of compromised accounts, enhances cloud protection, and provides safer remote access for employees.
A couple of ways that businesses apply the ZTNA to their security are via:
- Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) — to secure cloud-powered networks
- Network gateway — for blocking unwanted and malicious traffic
- More Secure SD-WAN — to introduce centralized access management while improving cyber protection for SD-WAN technology
Once it’s deployed to the architecture of a business, the network reduces the chance of a successful hacking exploit within the company.
Restricting Access Based On a Role
Companies pre-define the policies that determine who can or can’t access parts of the system. One way to decide who can enter specific parts of the network is based on their role in a company.
Naturally, team members need a certain level of access to do their jobs. This might include access to sensitive data as well as communication channels.
Organizations know which parts of the network employees need. To prevent cybercrime, they restrict access to any sections of the architecture that they don’t need to do their job.
As a result, even if the threat actor guesses or buys their credentials via hacking forums, they don’t get access to the entire network via one employee’s compromised account.
Limiting access based on the working staff also means that ZTNA can be implemented to meet the versatile needs of the company. That is, it can be customized for the specific needs of a business.
Preventing Deeper Movement of Malicious Insiders
What if hackers already gained access to the network in question? In that case, ZTNA detects the lateral movement of the malicious insider.
In cybersecurity, lateral movement refers to getting a higher level of access within an infrastructure. The bad actor starts at one entrance point and works their way up until they get to the sensitive data.
How might that look in practice?
Criminals might have stolen user credentials, purchased passwords via hacking forums or the dark web, exploited a vulnerable endpoint, or hacked weak passwords that an employee uses to log in to the company’s network.
As a result, malicious insiders have the data they need to get initial access.
To prevent that from happening, ZTNA requests additional verifications from the user as they move through the network. This is when a genuine user (and a company) is alerted of suspicious activity, and a bad actor gets caught.
Replacing VPNs With ZTNA
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) that many companies have adopted as a security measure at the start of the pandemic actually does little to defend the infrastructure against cyber attacks.
VPNs can encrypt and secure you when using public Wi-Fi or prevent Man in Middle Attacks. It can help you access Netflix from another country with geo-blocking.
However, when it comes to cyberattacks, VPNs are quite limited. For instance, it can’t:
- Protect your organization from malware, worms, or viruses
- Block new phishing sites that might harm your user (since they’re not yet marked as malicious and thus blacklisted by the VPN provider)
ZTNA is a more thorough and practical way to protect your network.
For example, it can filter malicious traffic to prevent it from harming your infrastructure.
Also, it can automatically block the threat actor. To compare, the VPN grants access to anyone who has the right credentials.
What’s more, ZTNA ceases access to the network for former employees — preventing them or a bad actor from logging into the system and accessing sensitive company data.
To Conclude: Trust No One?
Not quite. ZTNA is based on the idea of zero trust, which doesn’t refer to not trusting anyone but applying “trust but verify” when someone attempts to get access to the network.
Instead of automatically granting access to anyone who has credentials, it utilizes artificial intelligence to triple-check whether the user is a malicious insider.
Instead of assuming that a person who has the correct password and username is a real user, it presumes that it might, in fact, be a cybercriminal.
Automatic analysis of the data and implementing the pre-written security principles that govern who has access to the network (and which parts exactly), ZTNA concludes whether the activity indicates a high risk for the company.
Once it confirms that the user is genuine, it grants them initial or deeper access to the system.
When done right, a zero-trust network protects both workers and a company from cyberattacks that start with illicit access and end with leaked or sold sensitive user data.
