Zero Trust & Dark by Design Cybersecurity - An Imperative For Government And Industry

Being Cyber Safe with a Network Layer Cyber Platform

Zero Trust & Dark by Design Cybersecurity - An Imperative For Government And Industry

By Chuck Brooks

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Being Cyber safe and protecting government and industry comes down to a Zero-Trust and Dark by Design approach. Meaning do not trust any person or device, and make sure your data and operational infrastructure is not visible to your adversaries.

A significant reason for the upgraded focus on cybersecurity has been the result of rapid changes in the information technology landscape. The capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices and communications has grown exponentially, and so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers, including various criminal enterprises and adversarial nation-states.

Speaking at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show, CISA Director Jen Easterly insightfully stated that “my main message here is about cyber safety because we live in a world (as you just said) of massive connections where that critical infrastructure that we rely upon is all underpinned by a technology ecosystem that, unfortunately, has become really unsafe. And so it's incredibly important that us, as consumers, that businesses, that all of our partners come together to ensure that we can drive down risk to the nation and make us all safety as consumers.” Cybersecurity burden falling ‘on consumers,’ not companies: CISA director (yahoo.com)

Director Easterly’s words ring true for industry that owns or controls over 80% of the critical infrastructure, and especially for government that has increasingly been subjected to sophisticated cyber-attacks both in volume and capability to do harm.

According to a new?report?by?CloudSek, the number of attacks targeting the government sector increased by 95% worldwide in the second half of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.

The report states that “the increase in attacks can be attributed to rapid digitization and the shift to remote work during the pandemic, which broadened the attack surface of government entities and paved the way for an increase in cyberwarfare waged by nation-state actors.” Cyberattacks against governments jumped 95% in last half of 2022, CloudSek says | CSO Online

A recent international report?from?cybersecurity?research and marketing consultancy, CyberEdge, found that 68.2 percent of surveyed government organizations were compromised by one or more cyber-attacks within the past 12 months. Most Governments Were Hacked in the Past Year, Reports Reveal (govtech.com)

And ominously, a Russian hacking team known as Cold River targeted the Brookhaven (BNL), Argonne (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL), according to internet records that showed the hackers creating fake login pages for each institution and emailing nuclear scientists in a bid to make them reveal their passwords. Exclusive: Russian hackers targeted U.S. nuclear scientists | Reuters

The cyber-threats are becoming more severe, and the Russian/Ukrainian conflict has provided ample evidence of the importance of defending critical infrastructure and securing communications.

Director Jen Easterly and CISA’s promotion of public-private cooperation to enhance cybersecurity has been a focus of the agency. Over the past decade, DHS, DOD, and the Intelligence community have made a growing effort to bring the private sector together with the government, especially to develop information-sharing protocols. An underlying goal of government industry cooperation is to help develop frameworks and best practices to better protect against targeted cyber intrusions in an era of digitization.

?What is required for successful digitization is for every government agency to have a comprehensive single solution to address multiple security use cases – VPN, IoT, Micro-segmentation, Sensors, Mobile Devices, 5G, and Mobile Edge Computing.

To meet mandated Zero Trust requirements and be Dark by Design, a platform and enterprise network architecture should include a software-only Layer-3, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) platform in a single platform that can be used for securing mobile and server communications with:

·????????Enhanced network security and data in motion security by locking down public-facing networks

·????????A reduction in enterprise network traffic loads through true peer-to-peer/multi-peer connections with no proxies and other items such as concentrators and routers

·????????A reduction in network latency with secure peer-to-peer/data transport data transport, i.e. no hair pinning or unnecessary points of concentration

·????????Network Micro-Segmentation: Enabling the creation & enforcement of fine-grain endpoint policy control & administration

·????????IPSec-based On-Demand Encrypted Communications

·????????Ephemeral Digital Certificates (one time use) for authentication & secure communications

·????????Automated X.509 Digital Certificate Management

·????????Span ZTNA, SASE, SDP, SDN, SWG, CASB

·????????Real Time additions and deletions of end users managed centrally via policies if a device is lost or compromised

·????????Container to container security for?cloud applications?to prevent bad actors from infecting a container and spreading to others.

·????????Easy integration with existing capabilities through APIs such as Identity Management, Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation, Security Information and Event Management, Privileged Access Management, etc.

·????????And last, but not least, the elimination of the need for hardware based legacy VPNs and associated costs that burden both government and industry

?The platform should be able to protect against a myriad of lethal cyber-threats, including phishing, DDoS attacks, and insider threats. It should address the core elements of the White House Executive Order 14028 on Improving The Nation’s Cybersecurity, OMB’s Federal Cybersecurity Strategy, NIST’s Zero trust Architecture, and CISA’s Zero trust Model. ?The platform’s access model should fulfill the forementioned government risk management directives, and based on least privileged access.?

In 2023, the threat against both government and industry will continue to grow from state actors and organized criminal hacker entities further enabled by emerging technologies such as AI and 5G. ?There is a strong urgency to act. ?As CISA Director Easterly warned, our cyber ecosystem needs to be upgraded and industry and government need stronger collaboration. Choose the platform with the tools to make this vision happen and be more cyber secure.

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?Chuck Brooks is a globally recognized thought leader and subject matter expert Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies. Chuck is also an Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University’s Graduate Cybersecurity Risk Management Program where he teaches courses on risk management, homeland security technologies, and cybersecurity. He is also IEEE Cyber Security for Next Generation Connectivity Systems for Quantum IOT Vice-Chair and serves as the Quantum Security Alliance Chair for IOT.?LinkedIn named Chuck as one of “The Top 5 Tech People to Follow on LinkedIn.” He was named “Cybersecurity Person of the Year for 2022” by The Cyber Express, and as one of the world’s “10 Best Cyber Security and Technology Experts” by Best Rated,?as a “Top 50 Global Influencer in Risk, Compliance,” by Thompson Reuters, “Best of The Word in Security” by CISO Platform, and by IFSEC, and Thinkers 360 as the “#2 Global Cybersecurity Influencer.” He was featured in the 2020, 2021, and 2022 Onalytica "Who's Who in Cybersecurity" He was also named one of the Top 5 Executives to Follow on Cybersecurity by Executive Mosaic, He is also a Cybersecurity Expert for “The Network” at the Washington Post, Visiting Editor at Homeland Security Today, Expert for Executive Mosaic/GovCon, and a Contributor to FORBES. He has an MA in International relations from the University of Chicago, a BA in Political Science from DePauw University, and a Certificate in International Law from The Hague Academy of International Law.