Even compliant organizations' perimeters fail

The Equifax breach offers yet another case study in the dissolution and ineffective nature of the current state of security practices for enterprises. Even those that have spent millions on security and are fully aware of both the location of and the implications of their data security plans will fail epically when any instance of weakness is found in their perimeter-based security model.

Consider the technical and managerial aspects of the Equifax breach. The company had a large budget for their security team, all required and compliance mandated solutions were in place, and broad scope security monitoring and analytics were in place. And yet the entirety of the data repositories for the company, and more than 140 million Americans and over 800,000 UK citizens, was exploited over the course of a near year-long incursion.

The initial impetus for the infection occurred thanks to a vulnerability in the public-facing...