A Powerful Combination: Active Defense, the Bridge to Zero Trust

The end of May marked a monumental juncture for Zscaler as we continued to extend the Company’s cybersecurity reach with our intent to acquire Smokescreen Technologies, a leader in active defense technology.

This week, I am excited to report that the Smokescreen deal has closed, and we are proceeding to integrate its leading-edge active defense capabilities into the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. In contrast to traditional network traffic analysis tools, which are noisy and prone to false positives, active defense uses elaborate decoys and honeytraps to block the most sophisticated threats with high accuracy as attackers attempt to traverse corporate networks.

The appeal of active defense is how it turns the tables on would-be attackers. Security teams don’t have to hunt for network threats, rather the bad actors are lured to honeytraps, dramatically slowing their progression in order for security teams to quarantine the threats. While the ultimate answer is to migrate to a Zero Trust architecture thus eliminating the risk of network access, active defense is founded on the similar concept of trusting nothing and assumes that the network is already breached. This offers organizations a pragmatic path to Zero Trust and provides a simple, yet effective way for them to identify and remove attackers who may already be expanding laterally while compromising resources on the corporate network.

I invite you to learn more about Smokescreen’s active defense technology at Zenith Live 2021. The Zscaler ThreatLabZ experts will also share more in-depth research into emerging attacks, dissect recent attack chains, and provide clear guidance on how to better secure your enterprise from sophisticated threats targeting your software supply chain. You’ll also get an exclusive preview into Zscaler’s protection suite that unifies our threat intelligence, cybersecurity experts, and innovative technology to help defend your organization against the most advanced attackers.

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