6 CISO Takeaways From the NSA's Zero-Trust Guidance
All companies — not just federal agencies — should aim to adopt the "network and environment" pillar of the National Security Agency's zero-trust guidelines.
Zero Trust verifies each access request and limits privileges, reducing lateral movement after compromise through segmentation and continuous authentication.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Zero trust is a security architecture that grants no implicit access based on network location. Each request is evaluated using the user or workload identity, device state, requested resource, and relevant context. Its purpose is to limit the damage from stolen credentials, compromised endpoints, or malicious insiders by enforcing least privilege and restricting lateral movement. Zero trust is a design approach, not a single product or a claim that trust can be eliminated.
Effective controls include phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, strong identity and access lifecycle management, device and workload authorization, application-level segmentation, short-lived credentials, and auditable policy decisions. Policies should limit access to specific resources and actions rather than broad network zones. Poorly maintained identities, service accounts, segmentation rules, or policy exceptions can leave exploitable paths while creating false assurance; the identity and policy infrastructure itself also requires hardening, monitoring, and recovery planning.
All companies — not just federal agencies — should aim to adopt the "network and environment" pillar of the National Security Agency's zero-trust guidelines.
Zscaler Purchase Aims to Revolutionize Zero Trust Cybersecurity With Advanced AIZscaler bought a data security startup led by a longtime Salesforce executive to help customers stay ahead of threats by beefing up data quality and AI models. Zscaler said the purchase will help it strengthen its data quality and model efficiency to outpace AI weaponization by threat actors.