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Illumio named a Leader and a Customer Favorite in microsegmentation by leading independent research firm. Research states organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio. August 18, 2026 09:58 ET | Source: Illumio SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Illumio Inc., the breach containment company, today announced it has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave(TM): Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 report. Illumio received the highest scores among all evaluated vendors in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories and was named a "Customer Favorite" for its outstanding customer feedback among evaluated vendors. According to the report, "Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account." The report evaluated 10 microsegmentation providers against a comprehensive set of criteria covering product capabilities, strategy, innovation, and customer experience. Illumio received the highest scores possible in 10 evaluation criteria, including areas related to visualization, host-based enforcement, product security, vision, and innovation. According to the report, "Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions." "Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective - reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organization," said Andrew Rubin, CEO and Founder of Illumio. "Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favorite reflects to us the strength of our technology, vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the model threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense - and the new cyber." According to the Forrester Research report, "Organizations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio." The report also recognized Illumio for: * "Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations." * "Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organization by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams." * "Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases." The recognition follows continued innovation across the Illumio Platform, including Network Posture, which helps organizations understand security posture based on real-world traffic and prioritize risk reduction efforts. These capabilities support the growing need for visibility, cyber resilience, and regulatory readiness across complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Designed for operational simplicity, the Illumio Platform combines Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation to help organizations identify, assess, and contain cyber risk across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Security teams can uncover high-risk exposures, visualize potential attack paths, and implement segmentation policies from a single platform to contain threats and improve cyber resilience. The platform is trusted by some of the world's largest organizations, including BNP Paribas, eBay, and Microsoft, the latter of which has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its entire corporate IT environment. Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft, said: "When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment." Disclaimer Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester's objectivity here. About Illumio Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. Powered by an AI security graph, our breach containment platform identifies and contains threats across hybrid multi-cloud environments - stopping the spread of attacks before they become disasters. Illumio enables Zero Trust, strengthening cyber resilience for the infrastructure, systems, and organizations that keep the world running.

Trump's move to 'unleash' private sector hackers raises novel oversight, liability questions. The goal is to let private companies take on foreign cyber criminals, but the unprecedented approach raises plenty of questions about oversight and liability. August 14, 2026 6:33 pm President Donald Trump's order to "unleash" the private sector to conduct offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal hackers is raising novel questions about government oversight, as well as legal liability and other risks for private companies that enlist in the program. The national security presidential memorandum signed by Trump this week does not enable private sector companies to "hack back" when they face a cyber intrusion. Instead, it establishes a government-run program that will contract with private sector companies and approve any offensive cyber operations conducted by industry participants. The new directive follows the White House's national cyber strategy, released in March, which says the Trump administration will "unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and scale our national capabilities." Trump's memo directs the National Coordination Center to create and manage a program that authorizes companies to take offensive cyber action against "cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations." The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department will each designate a program executive director to co-lead the program. "Cyber operations shall only be approved after coordination between the program executive directors, and any resulting operational action will be exclusively conducted on behalf of and under the supervision of the federal government pursuant to the federal government's lawful authorities," the memo states. Tonya Ugoretz, former assistant director of intelligence at the FBI's directorate of intelligence, said the directive is "a novel approach to what's proved to be an intractable problem of cyber-enabled crime that we know affects every U.S. citizen to the tune of billions of dollars per year." Ugoretz is currently the leader of PwC's Cyber & Risk Innovation Institute. "These cybercriminal groups have proven to be resilient, and they bounce back inevitably after even the best, most sophisticated, well-organized disruptions that the government brings to bear," Ugoretz told Federal News Network. "I think this memo is a step towards taking an out-of-the-box approach to say, how can the government add additional capabilities to its arsenal?" Lyn Brown, a former senior attorney at the FBI and partner at Wiley Rein, says the memo is "kind of a natural extension" of Trump's 2018 policy that streamlined approval for military cyber operations. "This is recognizing some of the unique capabilities and access that the private sector has, and trying to leverage that and expand the fight against transnational organized crime to a broader degree," Brown said in an interview. Gary Barlet, a former federal chief information officer and public sector chief technology officer at Illumio, said the new approach recognizes that other nations have relied on criminal groups and other third parties to execute cyber attacks. "The reality is that the private sector has access to more talent and resources and not necessarily the same constraints," Barlet said. "We've already seen successful examples of this, like a big tech enterprise going after cyber domains that were involved in ransomware attacks." Government oversight and deconfliction. The landmark program, however, faces plenty of questions surrounding its implementation. Ugoretz said a key area to watch will be the resourcing of the National Coordination Center, a relatively new entity that was established to coordinate the activities of Federal Homeland Security Task Forces created by an immigration-focused Jan. 20, 2025, executive order. "Is it 24/7? Is it staffed with people with enough cyber and cyber operations expertise? That's where having an integrated entity like that can be challenging," said Ugoretz, who served as the first director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. "When you're standing up entities like that in the government, you're often not adding net new personnel and expertise," Ugoretz continued. "You're borrowing and pulling from the limited resources and expertise that already exists in various government agencies, which then has an impact on those agencies you're pulling from." The center's resourcing and other issues may be addressed by a classified annex to Trump's memo. The new approach also raises questions about how government agencies with classified intelligence will coordinate with the new private sector participants. "I imagine from a security standpoint, that the disclosures of sensitive intelligence to the private sector will be relatively narrow in scope for security reasons," Brown said. "But there's going to have to be some level of sharing for the government to be able to supervise and direct, and the private sector to be able to effectively carry out these kinds of operations against the targets that are selected." The memo also directs officials to establish "operational deconfliction" across federal law enforcement, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Defense Department, DoJ and the intelligence community. The effort to deconflict operations is a "good signal," Ugoretz said, given the potential for private sector hacking to clash with other operations in cyberspace and beyond. But she added that even after decades of experience, it's still difficult for government leaders to deconflict cyber operations and keep pace with fast-moving adversaries. "I don't know that they've cracked it yet," Ugoretz said. "And that's through no fault of their own. It's hard. There are so many agencies with so many different equities. Now you're adding private companies who need to be coordinated with and deconflicted. That's an additional level of complexity, but it's a real opportunity to address a challenge that's been longstanding, because adversaries are not using static infrastructure. They're shifting constantly to stay a step or two ahead of any disruption operations." Gray areas for the private sector. While the public part of the memo goes into detail on government oversight mechanisms, the risks and liabilities for private sector participants are less clear. Trump's memo requires companies to enter into contractual agreements with DoJ and DHS to participate in the program. The agreements are aimed at ensuring the companies undergo "rigorous vetting and that their performance adheres to... strict operational procedures," the memo adds. The memo also allows those companies directly participating in the program to enter into commercial agreements with other firms that may have access to "threat information." Ugoretz pointed out that the memo doesn't directly address legal liability for private sector companies and the implications of laws that make hacking illegal - such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - even if they're nominally operating under U.S. government oversight and supervision. "I think that will be front and center as companies decide whether and how much they want to participate," Ugoretz said. Brown said the contractual agreements will be "key" as DHS and DoJ develop the program. "I would hope there will be robust dialog so that the private sector can articulate to the government what it is that they're seeking in terms of potential liability protection or indemnification, along with the government's probable desire to have some kind of standardized template agreements for efficiency's sake and for uniformity's sake," Brown said. Barlet said the program also raises novel questions, such as whether private sector companies that participate in the program will be considered legitimate targets by foreign countries. "Some would argue they are already in the crosshairs, so giving them a path to fight back makes sense," Barlet said. "The potential benefits outweigh the risks, but we need to go into this eyes wide open - there will be friction, gray areas, and unintended consequences we can't fully predict yet." In addition to facing reprisal from foreign hackers, companies that contribute to the program could face "customer trust" issues by participating in or informing offensive cyber operations, Ugoretz said. "There's a lot for companies to weigh either when they're thinking about participating, providing data that enables the participants, or just being adjacent to this whole new ecosystem," she said. Justin Doubleday covers cybersecurity, homeland security and the intelligence community for Federal News Network. Related Topics