Another day, another massive data breach. This time some 100 million people in the U.S., and more millions in Canada. Reportedly the criminal hacker gained access to data stored on Amazon’s AWS systems. The fault was apparently not with AWS, but with a misconfigured firewall associated with Capital One, the bank whose credit card customers and card applicants were the victims of this attack.

Firewalls can be notoriously and fiendishly difficult to configure correctly, and often present a target-rich environment for successful attacks. The thing is, firewall vulnerabilities are not headline news — they’re an old story, and better solutions to providing network security already exist.

In particular, Google’s “BeyondCorp” approach (https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp) is something that every enterprise involved in computing should make itself familiar with. Right now!

BeyondCorp techniques are how Google protects its own internal networks and systems from attack, with enormous success. In a nutshell, BeyondCorp is a set of practices that effectively puts “zero trust” in the networks themselves, moving access control and other authentication elements to individual devices and users. This eliminates traditional firewalls (and in nearly all instances, VPNs) because there is no longer any need for such devices or systems that, once breached, give an attacker access to internal goodies.

If Capital One had been following BeyondCorp principles, there’d likely be 100+ million fewer potentially panicky people today.

–Lauren–