Reduce insider risk with Nightfall Data Exfiltration Prevention

Nearly one third of all data breaches are caused by insiders. While you might immediately think of malicious insiders, like disgruntled or departing employees, insider risk can take numerous forms, including:

• Sending PII, PCI, or PHI in popular SaaS apps like Slack, Teams, Jira, or GitHub
• Downloading files to unsanctioned locations

From these examples alone, it’s easy to see just how prevalent insider risk really is. Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, insider risks often have the same consequences as external risks, including data leaks, data loss, noncompliance, and more. This is precisely why Nightfall expanded our industry-leading generative AI (GenAI) platform to cover insider risk scenarios via data exfiltration prevention across SaaS apps and endpoints.

GenAI combats insider risk

Insider risk is often notoriously difficult to detect with legacy data leak prevention (DLP), which typically runs on regexes and heuristics. Using these outdated solutions, security teams might encounter the following challenges: 

• Limited visibility into the movement of data 
• High volume of false positive alerts
• Time-consuming manual investigation and remediation

These challenges not only overwhelm security teams with noise, but also lead to high-priority alerts slipping through the cracks. And when it comes to stopping sensitive data exfiltration, time is of the essence.

Nightfall leverages GenAI to stop data exfiltration

Nightfall expanded our industry-leading GenAI detectors to assist with monitoring, investigation, and remediation across SaaS apps and endpoints. Read on for an in-depth look at how Nightfall for Data Exfiltration Prevention helps security teams at every phase of an insider risk incident. 

Monitoring

Nightfall monitors data movement in real time and identify anomalous behavior like suspicious downloads. Nightfall also empowers security teams to cut down on unnecessary alerts by scoping policies based on their unique risk tolerance and compliance needs. Security teams can choose to focus their detection engine on:

• High-risk detection rules, such as secrets or credentials 
• High-risk content, such as specific files, folders, or drives
• High-risk users, such as departing employees

Nightfall also allows security teams to set thresholds based on the number of downloads or permission changes that occur in a certain time frame, such as, for example, “10 downloads in 24 hours.” 

Investigation

Nightfall streamlines the investigation process so that security teams are freed up to respond in real time. For example, when a security team receives an alert about a suspicious download event, they’ll be able to see all the information they need to take action, such as: 

• The specific policy that was breached during the download event
• The name, size, and quantity of files involved in a download event

Security teams can also get an extensive history of each employee and file involved in any given download event. These histories include:

• A comprehensive list of which employees shared, viewed, edited, created, or downloaded a specific file
• A deep dive into any given employee’s permissions as well as their previous file downloads, shares, edits, and views

By having this visibility at a glance, security teams can respond quickly to data exfiltration and insider risk events, all without having to leave the Nightfall console. 

Remediation

Timely remediation is key for controlling the flow of data and staying in compliance with leading standards like PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. With this in mind, Nightfall gives security teams the power to restrict user permissions, remove user access, or block file transfers in an instant. 

However, remediation is just one part of the data security equation; there’s also the matter of educating employees about security best practices. Nightfall does this by notifying employees about policy violations in real time. This way, employees have the opportunity to learn about company policies in contexts that are relevant to their workflows (as opposed to annual security awareness training). This education is a long-term investment into strengthening overall security posture and preventing future insider risk events.

TL;DR

Insider risk is a challenging issue for the enterprise, and unfortunately, legacy DLP falls short. But with Nightfall’s advancements in GenAI, it’s possible for security teams to monitor, investigate, and remediate potential insider risks before they escalate, all while saving on time and operational costs. 

Take the first step in preventing insider risk events in your enterprise; contact our team today to learn more.