How to Prevent Data Leakage?

Find out what types of data you are working with and how to prevent them from being leaked. Understand the basics of data leakage prevention and follow the best practices to reduce risks.

Global cyber crimes are rising as the use of GenAI are introducing new data exposure risks. It's a shocking statistic that over 77% of employees leak data over ChatGPT and we've seen how Oracle got hacked previously, even though the company claimed there were no data leaks.

Your data is valuable. Today, it might pose no threat but tomorrow, it can be misused for nefarious purposes. In simple terms, data leakage happens when your data gets leaked from an inside source and it ends up falling into the wrong data. This data can be sensitive records, login info, authorized data assets, credentials, files, and so much more.

If your goal is to learn how to prevent data leakage in a company, then our guide will serve you well. Let's get down to business.

Why Preventing Data Leakage Is Important

Do you remember how the Whatsapp flaw exposed billions of users online? It was said to be the largest data leak in history. 3.5 billion phone numbers were revealed along with directories of so many accounts. These numbers were linked to timestamps, texts, profile pics, and even exposed public keys used in E2EE encryption.

Preventing data leakage is important for one reason - you want to limit the scope of damages. Once an attacker gets his/her hands on your data, he/she can misuse the info on other platforms. How dangerous the data leakage is depends on the type of data being leaked.

Cybercriminals don’t need to exert a lot of effort after your data is leaked. No company is immune to data leakage and according to the Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data leak is around USD 4.24 million.

A good data leakage prevention strategy can help you secure your intellectual property and corporate data. It can also help you follow and adhere to the best security regulations, thus preventing compliance violations (which can save on costly legal fines!).

Common Causes of Data Leakage

Here are some of the most common causes of data leakage in organizations:

Misconfigured Routers and Networks

Networks and data systems can be complex, especially when they include AI tools, cloud services, and other application software. Misconfigured routers, endpoints, and APIs can cause data leaks in networks.

Social Engineering

Social engineering is another cause behind big data leaks. Hackers use social engineering techniques to trick employees and privileged users into giving away sensitive details. Cybercriminals can deceive you by posing as official members of departments and organizations. They can fabricate any number of reasons to get access to your confidential credentials.  You can wind up getting your login data, phone numbers, names, and other records stolen, if you're not careful who you engage with.

Zero-Days

Zero-days are vulnerabilities vendors haven't found yet on your network edge, devices, software, and assets. Many organizations aren't aware of these threats but hackers discover them before you do. This leads to exploits which translate later to sensitive data leaks and breaches.

Using Legacy Tools

Legacy tools and techniques have underlying issues which go unaddressed. Hackers see them as potential entry points through which they can cause sensitive data leaks. And these aren't just cloud-based, some devices, technologies, and tools can be outside your usual SaaS offerings.  Some malicious actors can even steal devices and breach storage devices to cause data leaks.

Impact of Data Leakage on Organizations

Data leaks have direct costs to your organizations. It impacts your daily operations and affects your legal standing negatively. You'll have to pay heavy fines and penalties if you break any compliance laws which are mandated by regulatory bodies.

These operational disruptions can lead to huge downtimes. Since your systems will go offline until they are restored, you will experience a huge loss of revenue. There's also a loss of customer trust and brand damage since people can't believe in your organization after a significant breach. 

Data leaks will tarnish your company's image, affect market positioning, and let your competitors get an advantage over you. It will strain relationships with your suppliers, partners, and investors long-term which could reduce your opportunities for collaboration in future projects. It can also kill your employees' morale and they might not be motivated enough to work or continue working with your company. 

Some of them may leave and you may experience an increased turnover rate, plus decreased productivity in the workplace. Negative feelings also crop up and members will feel guilty, anxious, and frustrated since the data that's leaked is personally tied to them. The data that's leaked could also be linked to their personal lives outside of their professional ones which means you will have to face the emotional impact and other negative consequences.

How to Prevent Data Leakage: Best Practices

Here is a guide on how to prevent data leakage and all the best practices you can follow to ensure sufficient data loss prevention and protection:

1. Locate and label your data

First and foremost, make sure you locate where your sensitive and business critical data resides. You can't secure your data unless you know where it is located and that's pretty obvious. After you've identified the number of assets that you have to protect and determine where all the data resides, you can then get to work on your data leakage prevention strategy. Using a universal data coding standard can help you label your data better and understand it clearly. You should use a data loss prevention solution to protect your sensitive information across your network and prevent potential leaks and disruptions.

2. Encrypt your data

You should encrypt your data into a different format or code that only users with valid passwords can access. They will need decryption keys as well and encryption can prevent hackers from reading your sensitive information, especially during a data breach. You should encrypt your data at rest and in transit.

3. Use endpoint protection solutions

Endpoints are all these devices that connect to your corporate networks and they are responsible for handling and managing data transfers. Since hackers target endpoints and these days we are working remotely, the number of endpoints you deal with will continue growing, so you definitely need an endpoint protection solution to have your back.

4. Teach your employees

You should also teach your employees about the latest endpoint security risks and make sure they are not negligent. Configure your endpoint security controls properly and make sure your network can't be infiltrated by securing it.

5. Evaluate vendor security posture

Don't just blindly believe what your third-party vendor says. Check their security status standing and evaluate it. Do an assessment before deciding and finalizing on them. See if their services and products are up to the mark because the cybersecurity landscape is constantly changing, so vendors will have to keep up to date and make sure they enforce and ensure compliance. This is your responsibility as a user, so you have to check every third-party vendor you work with.

6. Use security automation and standardize process controls

You will also need to use security automation because it can handle more workloads than humans. You should document and standardize your process controls and ensure that your data security policies can safeguard cloud storage after they are enforced.

7. Use role-based access controls

Not every company or employee does this by default, but we recommend applying them anyway. They will restrict access to all systems and sensitive files and limit permissions to whatever is necessary for specific roles. You can greatly reduce the risk of insider threats if you enforce role-based access controls. Plus, you should periodically review your access rights and ensure they align with all other organizational changes.

8. Validate cloud storage configurations

Cloud storage is one of the biggest causes of data leaks, so you'll have to secure it. Do this as soon as you set up and don't wait until it's too late. Periodically review and audit it as your company expands and evolves. Check if your cloud storage is working as intended and it doesn't accidentally leak data without notice.

9. Block Shadow IT and Tool Misuse

Insider threats are notorious and you can block shadow IT activity in your organization by enforcing stringent work policies, what tools, technologies and workflows your company uses. It should be clearly stated because these tools can be at the center of major data leaks if you're not careful. Your employee shouldn't be using tools that aren't authorized to be used in your organization. So keep note of all that and regularly detect permission misuse and unnecessary access via various services that are used by the organization.

10. Make Your Customers Data Savvy

Besides training your employees, you should also train your customers on how to protect their data. Tell them about their data rights, what access they grant you and anything else they need to know. So in the event of a major data breach, you can minimize damages and make sure they stay safe. Your customers have some responsibility and degree of control over their data. So you should be clear with your communication on this.

Don't take this lightly and collect their feedback as well regarding how you process their data and whatever else is done with it. The best way to prevent data leakage is by making sure that everyone is on the same page so that nobody is taken by any surprises at the last minute.

How to Detect Data Leakage Early

Here are some signs and tips on how to detect leakage early:

Battery getting drained fast

If you notice the battery on your device is draining too fast, then that's a telltale sign. More memory resources and system RAM is being used, which means if your data is getting leaked, your devices will be clocking over time.

Unusual network activities

Watch out for large and unusually high data transfers, especially the volumes. Keep an eye on them. Look for transfers to external locations and network activities during off-peak times. Unauthorized access attempts, failed logins, logins from different locations, and successfully logging in after multiple repeat attempts. Those are what you need to look out for.

Unexplained data changes

If any files are missing, your data suddenly transforms, or there's an increase in ransomware demands out of nowhere, then that's a signal that your data is getting leaked. Increased social engineering. You may notice a sudden influx of phishing and targeted spam emails. Criminals are known to launch malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks as well, which could lead to unexplained slowdowns in your networks and systems.

Crazy good ML model performance

If you're working with AI tools and machine learning models and you notice that the outputs are too good to be true and scarily accurate on test data, then you know that someone is tampering with your training data. That's a sign that data is being leaked and a malicious actor is already doing something in the works, which you're not aware of.

How SentinelOne Helps Prevent Data Leakage?

SentinelOne has a data loss prevention (DLP) solution which is known as Singularity™ Cloud Data Security. It offers AI-powered malware scanning and can elevate your defenses against sophisticated malware that targets your cloud data and storage. With adaptive, scalable, and AI-powered SentinelOne solutions for Amazon S3, Azure Block Storage, and NetApp storage arrays, you can protect your cloud storage from even the most advanced attacks. It can detect zero-day exploits in milliseconds with its AI-powered detection engines.

Prompt Security by SentinelOne can help you prevent data leaks from AI models. For example, you can prevent users from crafting malicious Prompt and injecting in your models, which are commonly used or known for hijacking LLMs. SentinelOne’s Prompt Security can also prevent unauthorized agentic AI actions. It also prevents shadow AI usage, which is one of the most common causes behind data leaks. Since Prompt security ensures AI compliance, you are less likely to suffer from data leakages.

You can add AI guardrails and protect data everywhere since your information will stay private across all AI interactions. It also enforces real-time data controls and adaptive privacy protections. It prevents data leaks through automatic anonymization and can establish and enforce granular department and user rules and policies.

You can streamline and automate threat response with automatic quarantine of malicious objects. You can also scan objects directly in your cloud data stores and ensure no sensitive data leaves your environment. SentinelOne also provides comprehensive coverage and support for regulatory frameworks like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GLBA, and many others. You also get scalable and load-balanced protection against file-borne malware and zero-days with one platform for cloud workloads, data security, endpoint, and identity for your AWS cloud real estate.  You can use SentinelOne’s Singularity™ XDR Platform to stop data leakage across endpoints and networks. It provides better security coverage than its EDR solution and extends its capabilities.

Singularity™ Cloud Security seamlessly combines an agentless CNAPP with a unique Offensive Security Engine™ with Verified Exploit Paths™, agent-based workload protection, and threat detection for cloud storage, thus bringing you an unrivaled cloud security platform. Prompt Security by SentinelOne secures your LLMs and provides model-agnostic data security coverage for providers like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more. You can prevent LLMs from generating harmful responses, validate and sanitize inputs, and prevent sensitive data from being leaked by users via shadow AI usage. It has guardrails in place and also ensures AI compliance.

Conclusion

Now you have everything you need to know in order to prevent data leakage. Start working by doing an audit of your organization's data assets, catalog your categories, label whatever you are ingesting and get to work from there.

Use SentinelOne solutions to streamline your data management and protection journeys. If you need any further assistance, feel free to reach out to our team. We are happy to support you and provide guidance.

FAQs

What causes data leakage?

Data leakage usually happens because of human error or malicious cyberattacks. Sometimes, employees accidentally send sensitive files to the wrong people or upload them to public sites. Other times, hackers use malware to steal information directly from your network. Weak security controls and unpatched software also play a big role. If you don't secure your endpoints properly, bad actors will find a way in and extract your valuable company data.

How can organizations prevent data leakage?

You can use SentinelOne’s Singularity XDR platform to stop data leakage before it starts. It helps you monitor network traffic and block unauthorized transfers effectively. You should also classify your data so you know exactly what is sensitive. Implement strict access controls so only the right people see important files. Make sure you encrypt your data both at rest and in transit. Regular security audits are also necessary to find weak spots.

What are examples of data leakage?

There are many ways data leaks out. A common example is when an employee uploads confidential work documents to a public cloud storage site or pastes code into AI chatbots. Another case is losing a company laptop or phone that isn't encrypted. Phishing emails can also trick users into handing over login credentials. Once attackers have those, they will exfiltrate your databases and sell the information on the dark web.

How can employees help prevent data leakage?

Employees act as the first line of defense. They should use strong, unique passwords and enable multi-factor authentication on all accounts. You need to teach them how to spot phishing emails and report them immediately. They must strictly follow company policies about data handling and never share sensitive info on unsecured channels. If they notice any strange computer behavior, they need to alert the IT team right away to stop the spread.