Trust is overrated

Don’t be fooled by threats on your internal network

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My last few posts on Cybersecurity for Executives covered network traffic and data flows between your company and the Internet and other entities outside your organization. Often security professionals call these external sources untrusted. Now I’m going to shift to talk about your internal network or the systems that reside behind your firewall, inside your network. In the past, this part of your network and the devices you operate yourself are referred to as trusted.

In theory, communication between the systems that reside inside your network should be safe. After all, they are your systems managed by your IT team and used by your staff. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. In too many major breaches, malware was able to break into an Internet-connected device, and then jump from that system to another device in your environment. The ability to move from one infected machine to another in a network is called “pivoting.”