The movie Breach, was written and filmed after a true story of our own American History. A young FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence operative Eric O’Neill worked as an investigative specialist with the Special Surveillance group and played a major role in the arrest, conviction, and later imprisonment of former FBI agent Robert Hanssen. This movie, tells the real life story of Robert Hanssen who was caught being a double agent that spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1976 to 2001. Hansen spent 22 of his 25 years with the FBI as a spy for Russia, and was the one to initiate the relationship volunteering information. Hanssen was assigned to an analyst task force responsible for millions of dollars of data, as well as many American lives. While in charge of this task force, his team was assigned to search for the operative who was selling our secrets, so he was able to steer the task force in any direction he wanted in order to never be in the spotlight himself, even if it meant trying to incriminate CIA operatives. However, behind Hanssens back, O’Neill was brought in undercover to work on the inside. He was tasked with gaining physical evidence and proof that Hanssen was the actual operative behind the American data breaches.
While the movie goes into detail showing how exactly O’Neill was able to develop a relationship with Hanssen, gain evidence against him, and ultimately help convict him, it also highlights ZeroTrust which is a very common term in the cyber world. Zero trust is a strategic initiative that helps prevent successful data breaches by eliminating the concept of trust from a users network. The goal of zero trust security is to protect the company from advanced cybersecurity threats and data breaches, while helping a company achieve compliance with FISMA, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, CCPA, and any future data privacy. With implementing a zero trust system, we are able to lessen the risk of breaches which can have catastrophic problems and large monetary consequences. We’ll be featuring more about ZeroTrust this year as the government moves to make it a standard compliance. While this movie is dated, the principles remain true to this day and is definitely worth a watch.