What Is Data Leak Prevention? Benefits and Best Practices

Today’s organizations work with incredible quantities of data. From corporate trade secrets to customers’ and employees’ personal information, much of this data is not fit for public consumption. But with growing volumes and complex IT environments, the potential for leakage is immense.

Data leak prevention is a cybersecurity practice that involves taking steps to keep sensitive information away from prying eyes. Let’s take a look at why it matters and how modern data leak prevention solutions work.

What Is Data Leakage Protection?

Data leakage refers to the unauthorized exposure of sensitive data, either electronically or physically, to an external party.

Data can leak through many channels, including email, physical storage drives, and even printed documents. This can happen intentionally or entirely by accident. But regardless of the cause, data leaks may have devastating consequences, including secret loss, regulatory fines, and damage to customer trust.

Data Leak Causes

There are many ways that your organization’s data could be exposed to unauthorized eyes, from simple human error to intentional malicious activity (either locally or remotely).

Common underlying causes of data leaks include:

• Employee negligence: Many data leaks are unintentional, though the harm they cause remains serious. This could be as simple as an employee sending an email with confidential data to the wrong recipient.
• Insider threats: Employees and other people with legitimate access to your workspace may deliberately leak confidential data for personal, financial, or competitive motives.
• Cyberattacks: Cybercriminals pose a significant threat to organizations, using techniques such as malware and phishing to gain unauthorized access to data and systems. They may aim to hold data for ransom for financial gain, steal source code and trade secrets, or use it to drive forward additional attacks.
• Misconfigured cloud services: Many organizations are actively migrating to cloud-native environments, but configuration errors during (or after) this process could expose your data to risk. The National Security Agency (NSA) considers cloud misconfiguration to be a leading vulnerability.
• Unsecured endpoints or applications: Laptops, mobile devices, and external storage drives can become vectors for data leaks if they are lost or stolen. Similarly, employees using shadow IT—like personal devices or software services outside of the IT environment—can inadvertently leak data.
• Improper disposal of data: Failure to securely erase sensitive information from retired hardware or properly discard printed documents can result in a leak.
• Weak access controls: Overly permissive user privileges can open sensitive data up to more eyes than necessary, increasing the risk of unauthorized exposure.

Data Leak Prevention Vs. Data Loss Prevention

While data leak prevention and data loss prevention sound similar—and even share a common acronym of DLP—they address different aspects of data security:

• Data leak prevention prevents unauthorized exposure of sensitive data outside the organization. These solutions establish safe principles around data access permissions and monitor data in transit, at rest, and in use. This avoids sharing confidential information with non-permitted parties.
• Data loss prevention primarily aims to prevent data loss due to accidental deletion, corruption, or system failures. This includes implementing backups and failover systems to keep data remains available and accessible.

In short, data leak prevention is about keeping sensitive information from getting into the wrong hands, while data loss prevention ensures data stores are not lost altogether.

How Does Data Leak Prevention Work?

Data leak prevention solutions work by continuously monitoring the flow of data in and out of your organization, analyzing its content and context, and enforcing security policies to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or transmission.

Common data leak prevention techniques include:

• Content inspection of files, emails, and messages to detect potentially sensitive information such as PII, financial data, or proprietary code.
• User behavior monitoring to identify abnormal user activity, which may indicate careless data handling or active insider threats.
• Endpoint security controls that prevent data from being copied to USB drives, personal devices, or unauthorized cloud services.
• Automated policy enforcement of predefined rules to restrict data access, encrypt sensitive files, or block unapproved transfers.

Data Leak Protection Benefits

Implementing data leak prevention strategies offers several key benefits:

1. Data Security

Implementing data monitoring solutions detects and prevents unauthorized access or sharing. In addition to preventing breaches directly, this monitoring may head off larger attacks by catching intruder activity in the reconnaissance stage and giving security teams a chance to react and bolster defenses.

2. Visibility and Control

These solutions also provide security teams with real-time visibility into data flows throughout the organization, making it easier to identify where sensitive information resides and whether there are areas of potential risk to address.

3. Intellectual Property (IP) Protection

In sectors where innovation is key, IP leakage is a particularly significant risk that can lead to a loss of competitive advantage and incredible financial harm. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, 45% of U.S. businesses have experienced losses due to IP theft.

Organizations that deal with software development and proprietary data must take steps to safeguard their IP from exfiltration by competitors or bad actors.

4. Regulatory Compliance

Many common regulatory frameworks, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), have clear requirements to protect sensitive data. Data protection solutions help organizations enforce security policies that align with these requirements. Failure to do so may lead to hefty fines and legal consequences—not to mention reputational harm.

5. Customer Trust

Implementing DLP solutions demonstrates a commitment to protecting customer data, which in turn helps build and maintain trust. Conversely, if a data leak is the result of insufficient data leak prevention, the exposure of sensitive information can devastate public opinion of your organization.

Data Leak Prevention Best Practices

To effectively prevent data leaks, organizations should consider the following best practices:

Classify Your Data

Start by taking a complete inventory of your organization’s data, and classify it based on its sensitivity and the impact it would have if leaked. This helps security teams prioritize limited resources and focus their efforts on securing the data with the biggest potential impact.

Restrict Access to Sensitive Data

Minimize risk by restricting data permissions based on user roles and responsibilities. Follow the principle of least privilege—employees should only be able to access the minimal level of data necessary to carry out essential job functions. This limits the potential for sensitive data leakage if a user loses their device or accidentally gives away their login information.

Grant permissions only as required, and revoke them once they’re no longer needed. Also enforce strict security policies for device usage, including encryption and remote wipe capabilities, to control the risk posed by device loss or theft.

Monitor Network Traffic

Data leakage protection solutions can continuously monitor network activity and contextually analyze message content, identifying and tracking sensitive data as it moves throughout your organization. This lets security teams log and respond to suspicious activity—and even to shut it down automatically if red flags appear. Plus, tracking makes it easy for your team to understand patterns and create incident reports as needed.

Assess Third-Party Risks

Even if you take cybersecurity seriously in-house, you may not be able to say the same about vendors and partners. Evaluate their security posture to make sure they adhere to your data protection standards.

Conduct Regular Security Training

Training sessions help employees and contractors understand the importance of data security and how to recognize potential threats. Explain your data security policies and the protocols for handling sensitive information. Consider phishing simulation exercises to show team members how to identify malicious emails and follow the proper steps for alerting your security team.

Implement a Unified Data Leak Prevention Program

Larger organizations may find that multiple departments or units have their own ideas about how to implement a data protection plan. This patchwork approach may be inconsistent and ineffective, with security gaps that open you up to serious risk. A centralized data leak prevention program enables more comprehensive protection.

Prevent Data Leaks With Legit Security

Data leak prevention is an essential part of a modern cybersecurity strategy, particularly for organizations that work with sensitive or proprietary information. By understanding the causes of data leaks, implementing robust prevention measures, and leveraging advanced security solutions, companies like yours can protect their assets from falling into the wrong hands.

Legit Security can play an important role in data leak prevention. The Legit Security ASPM platform gives you unprecedented visibility into your SDLC, including developer permissions.

The platform highlights where teams have unnecessary privileges that are needlessly increasing your risk.

In addition, Legit Security provides enterprise-grade secrets scanning, giving you the visibility, prevention, and remediation capabilities you need to secure secrets across the entire development lifecycle.

Ready to take data leak prevention to the next level? Request a demo.