A data leak occurs when sensitive, protected or confidential information is unintentionally exposed outside of its intended environment. This can occur due to internal human errors, software vulnerabilities or poor security practices and can expose personal details, financial records, proprietary information or trade secrets to hackers or malicious users. Data leaks can have significant consequences for individuals and businesses including financial loss, regulatory fines and erosion of customer trust.
Many of these incidents are accidental, such as an employee sending sensitive data to the wrong email address or accidentally deleting documents. Others can be the result of misconfiguration of systems such as a misconfigured cloud storage server leaving data open to anyone. Insider threats also contribute to data leaks, whether they are current or former employees seeking revenge, retribution or simply taking data with them when they leave an organization.
Even if the data that is leaked is encrypted, it can still be used against your customers and employees by capable cyber attackers who know how to decrypt. As a result, it is important that your security teams prioritize their efforts to protect the most sensitive and valuable data first. They can do this by conducting a complete inventory of all your data and classifying it based on its value and impact if it is lost or stolen. Then, security teams can reduce risk by restricting data permissions to only those necessary for each employee’s job role.
ZeroFox’s powerful data leak prevention solutions monitor the flow of data in and out of your organization by inspecting its content, context and user behavior. They prevent data leakage by preventing sensitive files from being copied to USB drives, external devices or unauthorized cloud services and by automatically encrypting them or blocking unauthorized transmissions.