Data Leakage Prevention

With intellectual property and data now forming a substantial part of company value, losing control of this information can seriously impact share price and brand reputation. However, with the combination of remote mass working and the increasing embrace of cloud applications, data leakage is often only a few clicks away.

Sapphire provides best-of-breed Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools that help organisations ensure critical data control and compliance. Applied across endpoints and networks, it ensures controls on the distribution of information against a set of agreed policies to track insider threats and malicious actions.

Alert: Reduce the risk from social engineering and malware attacks exfiltrating data in targeted attacks

Protective: Stop Insider threats and accidental data sharing with a tight set of policies around crucial information while also gathering data for education and official action

Governing: Oversee flows and policies of all critical data in your organization for governance and compliance purposes

Frequently Asked Questions on Data Leakage Prevention

1. What is Data Leakage?

Data leakage is the unauthorised exfiltration of information from within a network to an external recipient.

2. What are the categories of data leakage?

To understand how data leakage can be prevented, it is crucial to understand the different data leakage types. These include:

Accidental Breach- For instance, an employee may unintentionally leak sensitive data by accidentally choosing the wrong recipient and sending an email containing confidential data
Data exfiltration/Insider Threat – An employee may leak confidential information maliciously on purpose.
Malware – Malicious software is often purpose-designed to exfiltrate data from high-value targets within the organisation

3. How can data leakage be prevented?

Data loss prevention (DLP) ensures a tight set of rules and policies around data use, and particularly extraction, in an organisation. These policies are then enforced by specialised software.

Best practice for minimising data leakage on your network includes:

i. Classify data according to value and the sensitivity

Know which data can be shared and who should access the data you store and use this to form policies

ii. Proactively identify and mitigate using DLP solutions

Proactively identify and mitigate risks effectively by automating progressive DLP solutions

4. What tools should be layered with DLP?

For basic individual Data Leakage Prevention, tools such as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) alert when an attacker attempts to access sensitive data
Another primary data loss prevention tool is Antivirus software which prevents attackers from compromising sensitive environments holding data in the first place
Alternatively, a firewall blocks unauthorised access to systems storing sensitive data