Over the last two years, the pandemic has changed everything. What was supposed to be a gradual high-growth transition to the cloud turned into an accelerated race to digital transformation. Applications now live in the cloud and the remote workforce needs fast and secure access to SaaS applications, even if it means bypassing their corporate security controls. The majority of our daily productive tasks are done on the internet. In many ways, the internet has become the new network.
Adversaries are seizing the cloud-rush opportunity and becoming increasingly sophisticated and organized. To mitigate risk, enterprises are being forced to extend their legacy appliance-based network security architecture to the cloud, which dramatically expands the attack surface, creating an all-you-can-eat buffet for attackers. It only takes one maliciously crafted, never-seen-before malware to penetrate, infect machines, and propagate like wildfire, wreaking havoc inside your network. The good news is that it's preventable.
Network sandboxes have been around for decades. They play a vital role in protecting against patient zero infections. On a high level, they collect and detonate suspicious files in a virtual environment, analyze their behavior and issue a verdict of benign or malicious. With the advent of digital transformation, the dynamics have changed. The legacy appliance-based or out-of-band approach is outdated. Legacy networks and their pass-through architecture do not inspect files inline, cannot inspect encrypted traffic at scale, and let the first file through, creating an opening for patient zero infections.
Architecture matters. The zero trust model is the only way to stop patient zero infections. The approach is simple: don't trust any files and do not let them through without proper inspection. When done right, this approach can effectively prevent patient zero infections.
Continued investment in cybersecurity is important to stay ahead of the attackers, but before deploying or renewing a network sandbox solution, there are a few things to consider. Below are five suggestions to help you make an informed decision.
- Prioritize inline SSL inspection at scale
- Avoid appliance-based network sandboxes
- Ensure inline, not out-of-band, analysis of files
- Quarantine the file, don't let it through
- Leverage AI and ML to detect zero-day threats
To learn more about these five things, download our complimentary ebook: Five Gaps of Network Sandbox Solutions and see how you can fill these gaps with a zero-trust approach.
