Beyond the Risk: The need for data leakage  prevention

Find out what is data loss prevention and why DLP solutions are so important for corporate networks from our comprehensive article covering the fundamentals of data security.

DLP is used by organizations to detect, classify and protect sensitive data – such as intellectual property, financial and personally identifiable information. Organizations can implement DLP strategies to monitor data, reduce regulatory compliance risks and contain damage to the company if sensitive data is lost or compromised.

Data breaches, data leakage or exfiltration can be accomplished through several means, including account takeover, trojan malware, unsecured remote access, and copying or sending content via email. The need for prevention capabilities like a DLP strategy (and following the best practices) has never been greater. DLP solutions such as email protection, data exfiltration, and sensitive data protection are very top of mind for all organizations. Compliance regulations, security requirements from supply chain partners, along with state, federal, and global privacy drive the need for any company to enable a DLP program across the corporate network, inside cloud instances, and email systems. Encryption combined with a data loss prevention strategy also is mandated privacy mandates including HIPAA, PCI, and Hitrust. Despite the operational challenges, organizations continue to deploy data leakage capabilities technology to help prevent data exfiltration from happening. With the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, many users working from home bypassed corporate security controls to access their business critical data on their mobile devices. These workarounds included copying confidential data to consumer cloud storage services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and ShareFile. Some users would even attempt to email sensitive information to themselves from the corporate email account to their GMAIL or home office boxes. Despite all this, the ability to support and maintain adaptive controls, aiming to protect data, including data leakage prevention, email security, and outbound firewalls, still are an operational challenge. Even with comprehensive data loss prevention policies, compliance and auditing requirements, organizations still are challenged with the amount of security threats impacting their users. Remote workers, contractors, and business partner access also plague many security teams, jeopardising the implementation of data protection operations. Vendors making wholesale changes to their products through acquisition or sunsetting a product also is a main security challenge. As an example, when DLP vendors change their products, this also causes a downstream operation problem for IT departments and SECOPS to cope with. If a software vendor changes handling email encryption by requiring a new location for public keys to be stored or the vendor decides to end the life of a product, these actions cause a disruption in data security protection and operations. The cybersecurity landscape continues to grow with additional attack surfaces requiring data loss prevention capabilities to help thwart data theft attacks.

Secure sensitive data against external attack

According to the information age article, email continues to be the number one attack vector for organizations. Spear phishing attacks, DNS redirection, account takeover, and malware distribution continue to flood through the email and instant messaging platforms. While spam is a 20 year old attack vector, this method is used frequently today against employees and supply chain connections. Insider threats still make up most of the DLP related security events within the organization. A recent survey business insurance magazine shows that 48% of employees admit to making common mistakes that compromise email security and could lead to accidental data exposure. 42% of documents contained company research and data 39% contained security information like passwords 38% contained sensitive or critical information such as financial data and client information 36% contained employee data

The legacy of email DLP

Email DLP and other data loss prevention strategies have been around for several years. Exfiltration events (data breaches) continue to be on the rise across all markets. Many companies, including Proofpoint, Mimecast and Microsoft, have enabled DLP capabilities for global clients for years. While data loss prevention tools have a mixed result of success, the management of dedicated DLP tools over time requires a continuous evaluation and tuning. Over time, these tools became unmanaged and their effectiveness decreased. Many organizations only turn on “the basic DLP” rules because of the lack of resources to manage the solution on a full-time basis. Hackers know this and use this vulnerability to steal data and access confidential and critical information. The hacker community is well aware that most security adaptive controls rarely get fully deployed, except organizations that spend big dollars outsourcing to a MSSP or MSP service. Gartner often references in their security reports the challenges of misconfigured security solutions impact expected outcomes of SECOPS protection strategies. A rules-based Email DLP involves the administrator to enable complex rule sets, controls, and content inspection systems that should prevent data leaks inside the emails. It’s a challenging model that would be difficult for a small security team to maintain. While enabling email security is a critical piece to overall defense in depth strategy, having a full 360 degree SECOPS is far more important (learn more about the DLP risk indicators). Leveraging vendors that can simplify a security adaptive control while demonstrating a logical time to value while enabling most functional capabilities within the solution should be absolutely paramount to the organization.

Why Trustifi?

Trustifi is a cyber security firm featuring solutions delivered on software as a service platform. Trustifi leads the market with the easiest to use and deploy email security products, providing both inbound and outbound email security from a single vendor.

Cutting edge technology supporting Optical Character Recognition Technology

Trustifi’s OCR technology uses machine learning to scan email attachments such as images and PDF files.It then recognizes elements such as a scan of a credit card or a screenshot of a financial statement, and categorizes those attachments as sensitive, securing data. The attachment is automatically encrypted, reducing the opportunity for employees/individuals to mistakenly transmit unprotected confidential material.

Emails Get Automatically Scanned

The system automatically scans outgoing emails and applies the rules set by your administrator to detect sensitive data, then finds the keywords and automatically encrypts and locks the relevant outgoing emails with no input from the user. This ensures that sensitive data and attachments are not at risk before they reach their intended recipient and are protected from the prying eyes of hackers.

Culture

Trustifi’s email security services feature a comprehensive suite of email tools for advanced threat protection, easily configurable data loss prevention, and enterprise email encryption. Trustifi’s easy-to-use software is unmatched in its user-friendliness, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Trustifi’s time to value, ease of deployment, and lower cost of ownership for SECOPS makes the company a culture, secure, and financial match for any client seeking email security, data exfiltration, and message encryption.

Improve data visibility, manage data retention policies and access control even beyond organizational boundaries with our DLP software and full suit of comprehensive security solutions.