Authorized users’ mistakes represent over 85 percent of security events. Organizations may log thousands or millions of these events in a single day, and all it takes is one user’s errant click or weak password to potentially cause a breach.
Yet despite considerable investment in security-related tools, most organizations have not significantly lowered their risk profile year over year. No amount of protective technologies, policies or controls seem capable of effectively mitigating the risk introduced by users themselves.
Strategies Abound and Breaches Persist
Zero Trust is a framework that asserts no user or application should be trusted by default. It requires strict user authentication and constant verification. Yet, even with systems configured in accordance with these principles, an organization’s security is ultimately in the hands of users. Zero Trust acknowledges that bad things happen and prescribes techniques in place to limit the blast radius, detect the incident, and respond automatically. Breaches persist.
Mitigate Unintentional Insider Risk
How do you make your zero trust strategy smarter and shift left of compromise? It’s the users, stupid, but not all of them. Applying uniform controls across your organization does not address the nuances of individual risk, and often stifles the productivity of your low risk users. Start by identifying the riskiest users in your organization before a security event occurs and proactively build their risk profiles into your user authentication and authorization decisions.
By applying differentiated controls focused on your riskiest users, you save time and therefore save money. Start before the alerts arrive in your ticketing queue, before the next security incident hits your backend and your SOC has to pick through a ticket and unencrypt a laptop or backend server. Begin with a nuanced understanding of user risk in your organization to better inform the protective technologies you already have.
Making Zero Trust Smarter
Elevate Security’s proactive approach to security provides actionable insights on risky workforce behaviors that may be applied in advance of security events, driving behavior and policy change to reduce incidents. Through the same logs that your organization already integrates with SIEM and other technologies, Elevate Security creates a heatmap of risk across your organization, supporting trust decisions and driving safeguards based on:
- Actions People Take – clicking links, downloading malware, etc.
- Attackability – likelihood of the user being targeted
- Access level – the value of assets the user has access to
Our reputation service provides predictive individual risk information which can be pulled directly into your zero trust confidence engine, making it smarter. API integration allows you to automatically update your authentication policies, endpoint tools, DLP, email and even your web browsing requirements per individual. Start making zero trust smarter today – contact Elevate Security to learn how.
