Secure API Keys and Passwords with Nightfall’s AI-Native DLP

API keys and passwords are the keys to digital kingdoms, granting access to an organization’s most valuable systems and data. Traditional data loss prevention (DLP) systems often fall short in their attempts to protect sensitive data and secrets, leaving security teams overwhelmed with false positives and noise.

At Nightfall, we understand these challenges and the evolving threat landscape across SaaS and endpoints. Our AI-native, all-in-one DLP solution delivers smarter, more precise detection, empowering you to secure your sensitive data with confidence.

Legacy DLP Systems Leave Security Teams Out in the Cold

Legacy DLP systems depend on basic pattern matching and simple rules to detect sensitive data. While they may perform well under controlled tests, they fall short in real-world scenarios where context is key. Instead of providing actionable insights into vulnerabilities and blind spots, these systems inundate security teams with false positives and out-of-context alerts—resulting in wasted resources and mounting frustration.

In our testing, traditional systems achieved precision rates ranging from just 5% to 35%. Out of every 20 detections, only a few represent genuine threats, forcing security teams to sift through 19 false alerts for every real one—an exhausting and inefficient process.

A Smarter Approach with AI-Trained Detectors

Nightfall takes a different approach. By leveraging AI-powered detection, we achieve dramatically higher accuracy. Initially, we applied a convolutional neural network (CNN), which increased the precision rate to 87%. That’s much better, but not good enough for Nightfall’s high standards. 

Integrating a transformer model—the same powerful architecture used in modern Large Language Models (LLMs)—allowed us to further enhance our precision to over 90%. With this level of accuracy, 18 out of 20 detections represent real risks that warrant immediate action.

Connecting Context to Detection

In our demo video above, we show a real-world example of legacy DLP’s performance against Nightfall’s AI-trained detectors with two chunks of text. One is a natural language sentence that contains a Stripe API key, and the other is a JSON block with what looks like a Jira token. A traditional DLP system would likely flag both as threats, creating unnecessary noise.
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In contrast, Nightfall’s AI-based detection understands context, significantly reduces false positives, and ensures your security team focuses only on genuine threats.

DLP Should be Simple and Effective

Experience the precision of our detection in the Nightfall Playground—an interactive environment where you can test our capabilities against real-world scenarios. Experiment with cryptographic keys, database connection strings, API tokens, and passwords, and see how Nightfall outperforms traditional systems.

Protect your digital kingdom confidently—learn more by watching our demo video, experimenting in the Nightfall Playground, or scheduling a demo.