Data Loss Prevention in the Automated Era: Strategies for Safeguarding Information

In the era of digitalization, data is the lifeblood of modern organizations. Proprietary data, sales records, and customer details form the backbone of business processes. Surveys reveal that the majority of companies worldwide use data and analytics to drive their key decision-making operations.

This soaring value of data across the globe puts companies at risk of losing important information to attacks and breaches, making it paramount for them to consider data loss prevention techniques.

Many organizations now implement an efficient data loss prevention system to protect critical data, ensuring compliance and maintaining customer trust.

In this post, we’ll cover some significant strategies for safeguarding sensitive information. But before that, let’s understand what data loss prevention is and how it works to protect data against common threats.

Understanding Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of policies, technologies, and techniques that together ensure the safety of sensitive business data. It focuses on detecting and preventing the loss, misuse, or leakage of data through breaches or unauthorized use.

In most cases, organizations use DLP to protect important information, comply with regulations, achieve data visibility, secure workforces, and safeguard data on remote cloud systems.

How DLP Works

DLP solutions utilize different standard security measures, including firewalls, endpoint protection applications, tracking services, antivirus protection, and sophisticated technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation, to prevent data loss, spot abnormal activities, and analyze suspicious events.

These solutions monitor data in three distinct states: at rest, in process, and in motion. All DLP solutions follow three basic principles. The first one is to identify and categorize sensitive data for better defense against leaks or breaches.

The next step involves tracking data and ensuring that only authorized individuals gain access to it. It ensures that access is only transferred over approved networks or endpoints. For this purpose, DLP solutions use content-aware filters to flag specific datasets in case of initiation of suspicious activities.

The last step is about responding to security violations in real time. In case an access violation is found in the previous step, the DLP solution quickly responds to prevent any potential damages. A response can be of any form, from encrypting the data to ceasing the operations and alerting system administrators.

What Threats Does DLP Stops

Here are the main threats that DLP stops from affecting the integrity, privacy, or availability of an organization’s data:

• Extrusion - Many cyberattacks have important data as their target. Exfiltration usually results from cyberattacks that involve phishing, malware, DDoS attacks, or code injection. Stolen or transferred data may include intellectual property, login credentials, bank account details, and personally identifiable information (PII).
• Insider Threats - Insiders are individuals (employees, providers, partners, and contractors) who have information about company data, systems, and security practices. The insider either misuses their permissions or compromises a user account with higher privileges and attempts to transfer data outside the company.
• Negligence - At times, data loss is the result of remissness or accidental exposure. This happens when employees inadvertently share crucial information with individuals outside the company. Losing physical devices that contain sensitive data may also lead to data loss.

Data Loss Prevention Best Practices & Strategies

While data loss prevention best practices and strategies are different for all organizations, their ultimate objective is to secure sensitive data from unauthorized access. Below are some best practices that we recommend for preventing business data loss:

Data Identification & Classification

The ultimate data loss prevention technique is to identify the different data types the organization handles and categorize them depending on their value, sensitivity, and potential effect on the company. It helps you prioritize your resources and efforts to safeguard the most important data.

Data identification allows for the implementation of various security measures, such as encryption, access controls, and more, to protect data from illegal access and theft.

Data Encryption

Another effective technique for preventing data loss is to ensure that all crucial data is encrypted, both at rest and in transit. Portable devices should use encrypted disk solutions if they are holding important information.

With encryption, even if data is compromised, unauthorized individuals cannot gain access to sensitive data without the decryption key. It can mitigate the risk of data loss, maintain the confidentiality of crucial information, and comply with regulatory requirements.

So, select strong encryption algorithms, like AES, Triple DES, Blowfish, RSA, or Twofish, and encrypt data at rest on servers or storage devices and in transit using protocols such as TLS/SSL.

Store encryption keys separately from the encrypted data. Only authorized users should get access to these keys. Also, keep updating your encryption protocols every now and then.

Access Controls

Establish strict access controls to limit unwanted access to crucial data and ensure that only authorized individuals gain access to such data to perform their job functions. Access controls can take different forms, such as password-protected accounts, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and role-based access controls.

You can apply access controls to different individuals or entities with permissions to access data or resources within a company, including employees, providers, partners, contractors, or other authorized users who need access to particular systems.

With the implementation of access controls, companies can control data loss because of human error. These are useful in preventing unauthorized individuals from acquiring access to sensitive data, reducing insider threats, and limiting the damage caused by breaches.

Data Access Monitoring

Tracking who, when, and why accesses sensitive data aids companies in identifying potential data breaches and performing actions to prevent further unauthorized access. You can monitor data access by logging access attempts, analyzing system logs, checking user activity logs, and implementing real-time tracking solutions that can detect suspicious activities.

All this provides a record of who accesses sensitive data and when. This is useful in timely detecting and responding to potential data breaches, controlling the damage caused by a breach, and stopping further unauthorized access.

Regular Security Audits

Security audits provide a comprehensive review of a company’s information security policies, methods, and controls to find any potential vulnerabilities within the infrastructure and recommend remediation actions to address them.

Regular security audits help companies identify weak points in their software, hardware, network infrastructure, or security procedures that could lead to data loss. Once identified, organizations can fix them by patching software, updating hardware, establishing new security controls, or changing security policies before attackers can exploit them to access data.

Operation Automation

In today’s era, it is a good practice to automate as many security operations as possible. This is especially useful for large enterprises whose IT environment is spread across various geographical locations.

Manual techniques are fundamentally restricted in terms of data scope and coverage. On the other hand, automation helps detect and respond to anomalous activities, carry out repetitive tasks, install updates, define policies, etc.

Virtual Private Network Service

It is an excellent approach to use a virtual private network (VPN) when accessing the company’s network remotely. A VPN is a service that performs two key functions, i.e., encryption and IP address anonymization.

It provides an encrypted communication channel between the user device and the server for secure data transmission. Some of the best VPNs, such as the robust NordVPN, also come with various features to give users control over the specific data getting transferred.

Employee Training and Awareness

Workers usually don't recognize that their actions can also lead to data losses. By educating them about cybersecurity best practices, organizations can minimize the risk of data loss caused by human error.

Provide in-person training, online training, and seminars on data handling. Give guidelines on using encrypted storage devices or prohibiting the use of personal email accounts for work purposes. You can also send out regular emails to keep them informed about the latest trends in cybersecurity.

Also, raise awareness of bad practices and help employees fix them by offering clear instructions on how to handle such situations.

Incident Response Plan Implementation

Even after taking all the measures to thwart data breaches, they can still happen due to various factors, such as a new or unidentified vulnerability within the system or sophisticated techniques used by an attacker.

So, it is important to have a robust incident response plan established that defines the actions to perform to address data breaches. In most cases, an incident response plan involves the following series of steps:

• Preparation - This phase ensures that all points of your incident response plan are approved and funded already.
• Detection - It is where you determine whether you have been breached. You need to find out when the breach happened, how it was discovered, what is the scope of the compromise, and whether the source of the event has been discovered.
• Containment - Contain the breach to prevent further data loss by isolating affected systems, establishing short- and long-term strategies, and having a redundant system backup to restore business processes.
• Eradication - Next is to find and eliminate the root cause of the breach. Securely remove malware, harden and patch the systems, and apply changes.
• Recovery - It involves restoring and returning affected systems and devices to the business environment.