A regional hospital system has been attacked—again. The culprit? Ransomware launched through a phishing email. The threat actors want to hold the hospital system hostage, shutting down its electronic health records and patient portals. If the hospital can't access patient records and scheduling systems, then everything but critical care will be canceled, resulting in lost time, revenue and trust. Luckily, the hospital systems' IT and security teams learned by watching attacks on other organizations and put a zero trust strategy in place. A zero trust strategy isolates threats to a specific area, limiting the ability for attacks to move to other parts of the organizations and limiting disruption.

A nation-state threat actor group seeks to sow chaos. Knowing that smaller towns and rural cooperatives rarely have the budget or staff for robust defenses, that's where they focus. They also hope a smaller utility will provide the gateway into an even larger grid where they can do more damage. Their goal is to attack a water treatment plant and raise chemical content to dangerous levels, poisoning the water supply.

But their first target has learned lessons from other attacks. The rural county's security lead put a zero trust strategy in place over the facility's operations technology infrastructure and industrial control systems. Implementing continuous and adaptive authentication throughout the entire organization—from grid to corporate systems—improves protection and limits the opportunity for wide-spread compromise.

The finance sector offers a tempting target to threat actors. In 2020, that target became larger as more people worked from home. More consumers and businesses shifted purchasing online. Ahead of the pandemic, a leading credit bureau adjusted its perimeter-focused security model to a zero trust approach in order to improve security and the customer experience. This approach ensures that each connection—whether it is users, devices, or applications—is continuously checked for authenticity and need.

Using zero trust approach, access is limited and conditional. When a third-party vendor is hit with a malware attack, the credit bureau is less concerned about how they will be affected. A combination of network segmentation and identity and access management provide critical context that quickly identify and isolate attacks—and provide targeted remediation. As a result, data is protected and business operations aren't delayed.