Why Email is the Biggest Security Vulnerability of All
A Security Threat Hiding in Plain Sight There’s been a lot of buzz around remote work and securing enterprise collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint from data loss, and for good reason. However, email which is arguably the oldest and most commonly used collaboration and communication tool, can be just as big a threat when it comes to data loss and breaches caused by employees or ‘insiders’. A recent Forbes survey found that nearly half (47%) of IT leaders said email is the threat vector they’re most concerned about protecting when it comes to data loss prevention. So, how big the threat and what can be done to ensure email data loss prevention? Why Email is the Weakest Link We use email every day to communicate with our colleagues and third parties to provide updates and share ideas, as well as collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and more. However, the consequences of sending an email to the wrong person can be dire. Once you hit send you can’t retrieve it or track where else it goes once the recipient gets a hold of it. These are the top three ways data leaves the company via email according to Forbes: 1. Sending Email to the Wrong Person We’ve all had that ‘Oops’ moment when we realize we selected ‘Chris’ instead of ‘Christine’ and hit send. Surprisingly, it’s simple errors like this that actually pose one of the biggest threats to data security. Misdelivery (documents and email that ended up with the wrong recipients) was the fourth most common action associated with a data breach according to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report. There can be serious consequences for an innocent slip of the keyboard. For example, a misdirected email that contains personally identifiable information (PII) that can be accessed by an unauthorized recipient is considered a data breach under GDPR and other data protection regulations around the globe. 2. Sending Email to Personal Accounts The shift to remote work has resulted in employees downloading a lot more data to personal accounts and devices to simply get their work done. A recent survey found a 49% increase in email attachments and 123% increase in data being copied to USB drives with 74% of that data marked as “classified” since the pandemic began. While this may not be malicious activity, employees are underestimating the consequences of sending sensitive data to personal email accounts. Depending on the nature of the data, this act alone can constitute a data breach. Not to mention you wouldn’t want intellectual properly or other material company information being stored in an employee’s personal email account, cloud share or device that is probably not as secure as corporate sanctioned accounts and systems, and is impossible to track and manage. 3. Malicious Users Stealing Data Via Email While in many cases email data loss is accidental or due to negligent behavior, unfortunately there are people who use email to steal company data for personal gain. In these instances, the stolen data is used for business advantage and taken with them to a new job, to start their own competing business, or handed over to a foreign government or organization. Our last blog, Five Risky Misconceptions About Intellectual Property Theft, detailed several real-world examples of insider IP Theft. Email is the perfect vehicle for insider data theft because when an employee emails themselves a document, all its permissions are removed when it is attached to the email. So, for example, if the malicious employee’s access permissions on the file share, SharePoint or Teams is View/Read only, once the email is received, the user now has full control over the attachments so they can save, edit, print it, etc. It also opens up another security vulnerability as the email and its attachments will remain in the user’s “Sent Items” in Exchange. This enables any administrator to look at the documents even though that same administrator does not have access/visibility to that document in the file share, in SharePoint or Teams. There are well documented cases of snooping admins that lead to serious breaches (think Snowden). It’s far too simple to simply email yourself a document without anyone knowing – unless the business has preventative measure in place. The Types of Data that Pose the Biggest Risk While each organization is different, sensitive data or information that falls into one of these 3 categories can have significant consequences for the business and your bottom line if accidentally shared or stolen via email: Personal Data – This is not limited to personally identifiable information (PII) and Protected Healthcare Information (PHI) but also includes HR information, biometric data, etc. If breached it is often subject to regulatory and legal penalties. Business Data – Trade secrets, acquisition plans, financial data, supplier and customer information, etc. that are critical to the business. Classified Data – Most often used by government, classified data is restricted according to its level of sensitivity (for example, restricted, confidential, secret and top secret). Email Data Loss Prevention Tips If you have legal, regulatory, or contractual requirements to prevent data loss or if you just want to retain your company’s intellectual property and business-critical information (like customer account lists) be sure to protect email from insider threats. Make sure that you’re properly training your staff on email policies and have a data loss prevention solution for email (and your other collaboration tools) in place to protect email from insider threats, just as you do for external threats lurking in email such as phishing links, malware and ransomware. Protect your sensitive data and IP from accidental data loss and malicious users, with these advanced information protection capabilities from NC Protect to automatically: Encrypt sensitive email attachments Block email attachments that contain sensitive data Replace attachments with a link to a URL that requires the recipient to authenticate. Force viewing of sensitive documents in a Secure Reader to prevent saving, copying and/or printing. Apply personalized watermarks that containing information about the user to deter photographing
NC Protect Named Data Security Innovation of the Year
I am proud to announce Nucleus Cyber’s NC Protect received the 2020 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award for Data Security Innovation of the Year. This esteemed award program honors excellence and recognizes the innovation, hard work and success of top companies, technologies and products in the global information security market. This new award comes on the heels of being named 2019 Access Management Solution of the Year by CyberSecurity Breakthrough. The ‘Data Security Innovation of the Year’ award validates the innovative dynamic, data-centric approach utilized by NC Protect to ensure secure collaboration across the enterprise. There are some clear advantages that come with NC Protect that really make it stand out. It not only dynamically controls access to content, it also controls how users can share it, and with whom, across all supported platforms; It offers unique features not found in native apps, such as dynamic watermarks, and; A secure web viewer to ensure business-critical content can be shared securely internally and with third parties. There has never been a better time to consider NC Protect. Contact us to learn how we leverage your existing technology investments for a simpler, faster and more cost effective solution to tailor protection of files, messages and chats in Microsoft O365 and Nutanix collaboration tools.
9 Ways Data Vampires Are Bleeding Your Sensitive Information
Beware! The mass conversion to remote work and adoption of new collaboration tools leave sensitive information at risk from data vampires. Today we share an old dark tale for you, but just as in Grimm’s fairy tales, the lessons are still relevant today. In fact, one might argue with the mass conversion to remote work and adoption of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams it’s even more important than ever to be on the look out for these modern data vampires lurking in your organization. Pull a Van Helsing on those sucking the lifeblood from your sensitive information and intellectual property. Vampires do exist — in the workplace, that is. They bleed your company of customer data, confidential information, and intellectual property (IP) — the lifeblood of any organization. These shadowy figures exist in every enterprise and take the form of malicious insiders looking to benefit from the theft of company information, as well as negligent insiders who inadvertently put data, IP, and the entire enterprise at risk. While this sounds like a good old-fashioned horror movie, data vampires pose a serious threat. Data proves that IP theft has affected even the biggest and most sophisticated companies, as well as the government and private sector. No one is safe: Every industry has a horrific example to share of falling victim to nation-state espionage. It’s important to note that the impact from mistakes is just as dangerous, with human error accounting for 90% of data breaches in the cloud, according to some reports. Collaboration tools designed to empower data sharing also have the unintended consequence of making data theft and accidental loss (or sharing) widespread. Here are nine of the most common data loss scenarios keeping organizations up at night: Vampires on the Hunt A once dedicated employee has accepted a job offer with a competitor that pays better and has a shorter commute. Before flying off into the moonlight, he plans to download copies of all client contacts, internal communications on planned product improvements, and anything else that will help him succeed at the new company. One of your employees with access to customer personally identifiable information and payment data conjures a scheme to use that information for personal profit and downloads/copies it to carry out the crime. Your senior developer steals research and code on your latest innovation and then leaves to start her own company and launch your product before you do. An employee is bribed by a third party, maybe a competitor or even a nation-state, to download and steal your IP. The “other” plans to market it as their own technology, and perhaps in another country that has less stringent copyright and trade protection laws. Inadvertent Bloodsuckers An employee accidentally shared a sensitive file with the wrong individual or group, inadvertently sharing all company salaries with the entire staff instead of just the executive team. “Oops! That wasn’t meant for you.” — that’s the co-worker who mistakenly shares the wrong file either by Dropbox or email attachment. The individual who shares a sensitive file with a setting that is too open, mistakenly allowing recipients to then share it with others (e.g., the “anyone with the link can view” setting). “I’m not supposed to send you this but…” Someone who has shared sensitive data with another who should not have access to it (but, well, you know how that goes). Allowing end users, instead of IT, to create file shares, resulting in wrongly configured sharing settings (e.g., files are accidentally open to the public Internet or open internal access). Put a Stake in Data Vampires with Four Critical Steps If you think these culprits are works of fiction, think again: Many are ripped right from recent headlines. However, you can stop data vampires and protect business-critical and sensitive information without hampering collaboration, or losing too much sleep, by channeling your inner Van Helsing to act: Clean-out the skeletons in your closets. Research shows that 60% of companies admit more than half of their organizations’ data is dark (they don’t know where their sensitive data lives). To start, scan all of your content collaboration systems to identify sensitive information, then classify and secure it before it comes back to haunt you. Swap your wooden stake for a data-centric approach. Traditional security tools weren’t built to protect today’s diverse collaboration channels and all the data that comes with them. Instead look for data-centric solutions that use both file content and user context to augment security depending on parameters such as the document sensitivity, role, time of day, location, and device to determine if content can be accessed by the user and what can be done with it. Ward off mistakes with automation. The best way to protect against unknowing offenders and accidental breaches is to stop bogging users down with complex rules for data sharing and security that are easy to forget or circumvent using shadow IT. Take advantage of technology that can apply restrictions, such as preventing the emailing, sharing or downloading of sensitive content based on document sensitivity, to prevent unwanted actions and consequences. Sharpen your tracking skills. Track the life cycle of sensitive data so you can see who has accessed it and how it has been used or shared to provide a full audit trail. Be sure to have a process in place to notify managers and stakeholders of potential violations. This Halloween and year-round, remember that technology is your friend when hunting down data vampires — no matter what form they take, malicious or negligent. This post by Nucleus Cyber’s Steven Marsh originally appear in Dark Reading Drop that stake and get a modern tool design to stop data vampires in their tracks NC Protect provides a simpler, faster and cheaper solution to tailor information protection for file sharing, messaging and chat across collaboration tools. With NC Protect, ensure compliance with regulatory and corporate policies and protect against data loss, misuse, unauthorized access and simple human error to mitigate risk to sensitive information in Microsoft Office 365 apps including SharePoint Online and on-premises, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, and
Secure Collaboration, Is That Possible?
To quickly roll out collaboration solutions and enable remote work, have we sacrificed the security of business critical data? Evidence suggests data loss from within the organization stemming from employee negligence or theft is a big problem now, more than ever. The Virtual Pub hosts Boaz Fischer and Sean Ofir, and guest, Nucleus Cyber CEO Kurt Mueffelmann sat down to dig into the challenges of protecting business critical information with the shift to remote work, proliferation of collaboration channels, and growing insider threats. So, Is Secure Collaboration Possible? Watch the Podcast to Find Out In this podcast, the trio discuss secure collaboration challenges and solutions, including: The impact of COVID and remote work on how we store, use and share information How to protect business-critical information with the proliferation of content and collaboration tools Insider threats – What are they? Are they real? Plus Examples. Why traditional DLP doesn’t address modern collaboration risks How NC Protect uniquely addresses information security in collaboration apps including Teams, SharePoint and other Office 365 apps Watch this episode of the Virtual Pub to unlock the secrets to win the battle battle insider risks.
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