How Zero Trust Protects Your Organization from Reconnaissance?

Ransomware and cyber attackers employ several steps to access your network and compromise sensitive data and business resources.

In today’s modern workplace environment, where employees are required to access the company’s network resources via public internet or BYOD devices—the risks of data breaches and hacking attempts have gone at par, and they’re only increasing with time.

Cybercrime is predicted to cost $10.5 trillion worldwide by 2025—growing by 15% each year.

Hence, take the utmost preventative measures and secure your network with tools that meet your modern requirements. Reconnaissance is usually a major and common step cyber attackers take when planning a cybersecurity attack and accessing your network.

This article will look into what reconnaissance means and how Zero Trust solutions can help prevent it for your organisation.

What is Reconnaissance?

Reconnaissance is normally the first step in the MITRE attack framework, which includes closely monitoring your network, systems, and applications and gathering information to plan for a cybersecurity attack.

Malicious attackers use reconnaissance and implement this step to learn about your company network and discover vulnerabilities to later use this information in choosing the right tools and attack strategies.

They gather a lot of information about your enterprise network and components, including:

IP addresses
Servers
Usernames
Subdomains
Security policies
User information, such as personal preferences and email addresses

Moreover, they also gather information, including what operating systems are being run, what ports are open, what security patches are installed, or if they’re installed at all, what passwords users use, and where you keep your encryption keys.

Thus, reconnaissance helps attackers collect any information to identify vulnerabilities and create a solid attack plan.

So, how can the Zero Trust program help you prevent reconnaissance? Let’s find out.

How Can Zero Trust Help Block Reconnaissance?

The Zero Trust Application architecture is a network security model that removes excessive implicit trust and trusts no one within or outside the network perimeter.

It enforces continuous user and device identification, authentication, and authorisation before granting access to the network and its applications and sensitive assets.

Moreover, it also cloaks the network through server blackening—preventing network visibility.

Here are some Zero Trust solutions that help prevent and completely block the risks of reconnaissance by malicious hackers and attackers.

The Secure Zero Trust Application Access

The problem with the traditional remote access solution is that they offer excessive trust—allowing lateral movement within the network and encouraging reconnaissance. They also increase the attack surface—allowing untrusted users to access your network applications and exploit them to steal critical data and information.

On the other hand, Zero Trust Application Access blackens your IT infrastructure and provides only “Need to know” application access to the users.

Instead of accessing the entire network applications—ZTAA ensures and provides users access only to specific applications they need to get their work done.

Thus, it helps prevent the lateral movement and active scanning and collecting of host information—as ZTAA hides this information and vulnerabilities from the attackers.

Allows only authorised users and devices through MFA

Zero Trust Application Security also prevents collecting user information like email addresses and passwords, preventing unauthorised users and untrusted devices from entering or accessing your network.

It removes the latency issues and lags associated with traditional solutions and allows only authorised and authenticated users to access your enterprise network and its applications.

Zero Trust Security measures like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) let users access specific applications. And since the network isn’t visible to everyone, even if hackers successfully get into the network, they cannot gain access to applications without user credentials—reducing the impact and chances of reconnaissance.

Granular user controls

With Zero Trust Application Access, you gain better control and visibility over who can access the applications and through which device.

Setting the least privilege access minimises the attack surface. In addition, you can easily define access policies and rules at a granular level for each user, device, or group.

Moreover, it also lets you control and restricts access to devices based on device security posture and risk assessment—preventing reconnaissance risks and their negative impact on your organisation.

Conclusion

While traditional solutions provide perimeter-based network security, Zero Trust also protects your internal network and restricts application access to unauthorised and unauthenticated users.

It significantly removes and safeguards your network from reconnaissance risks by preventing lateral movements, implementing least privilege access, MFA, granular access controls, and Zero Trust Application Access.