The email dlp is a technology designed to monitor, detect and prevent unauthorized sharing of sensitive data through email. This includes encrypting emails, deleting them across mailboxes and blocking emails from being sent to unintended recipients.
Email data loss prevention (EDLP) not only blocks external email threats, but it can also protect internal data from breaching ethical walls/information barriers within an organization. This is especially critical for companies that must abide by privacy laws or have a history of employee missteps.
Detecting Sensitive Data
Email DLP (Data Loss Prevention) is a tool designed to assist businesses in detecting sensitive data that has been misused against company policy. This includes any type of confidential information a business does not want shared outside its network, such as customer details or intellectual property.
Sensitive data should always be detected, as employees have the potential to accidentally leak information by sending confidential messages with wrong recipients. This can take place through various methods such as responding to phishing scams or accidentally sending sensitive data via email to someone who is not authorized to receive it.
Intelligent DLP rules differ from traditional DLP in that it utilizes contextual machine learning to understand and anticipate user behavior in order to prevent data breaches. By analyzing patterns of email sending sensitive data to the wrong recipient or phishing attempts, intelligent DLP can quickly detect risks such as these.
Blocking Sensitive Data
Email DLP utilizes machine learning to interpret the context of an email, reclassifying data based on how it’s sent and received. This assists security teams in recognizing potentially hazardous emails that might otherwise remain buried in their inboxes.
For instance, a business might want to prevent employees from sending sensitive information outside the company network. Doing so violates company policies and can result in costly damage if exposed.
Another risk to sensitive data is when employees use their personal email accounts to send or receive files containing company information. This is a violation of company policies and can be difficult to detect without active email DLP software.
Many email DLP solutions utilize static rules to prevent users from sending certain types of information. While this approach can be effective, it also enables users to work around the rules, potentially weakening an organization’s security posture.
Remediating Sensitive Data
Email data loss prevention (DLP) best practices safeguard sensitive information from exfiltrated or accessed through malicious email attacks. Preventing sensitive data from reaching the wrong hands can help avoid legal and financial repercussions, while protecting both your company and its reputation.
Email DLP systems can safeguard your data by monitoring the content of your email messages for suspicious activity and blocking any outbound emails that contain sensitive data. Furthermore, they send notifications when an incoming email violates your DLP policies.
Traditional email DLP systems utilize static rules that scan both text and attachments for keywords, dictionary matches, or other patterns indicative of sensitive data. While this approach requires a significant amount of time and resources, it has proven successful at alerting administrators to the presence of sensitive data within outgoing email messages.
Intelligent email DLP utilizes contextual machine learning to evaluate the context of an outbound message, determining if it is a legitimate business communication or an attempt at exfiltrating sensitive data. This predictive and preventive analysis can help identify bad leavers who might try to smuggle your network’s data outside.
Monitoring Sensitive Data
Email is a vital communication channel for business, yet it also has the potential to expose sensitive data. Employees who accidentally send this data outside the company network pose a serious risk to businesses as does anyone with access to this data without permission.
That is why many security leaders prioritize email data loss prevention (DLP). DLP helps safeguard sensitive information against malicious insiders and careless users who could potentially leak it to third parties.
Traditional DLP software will monitor incoming messages and flag them as potentially sensitive based on preprogrammed rules customized for each user.
However, static rules cannot prevent phishing scams, misdirected emails or accidental data leaks, nor can they stop all instances of employees sharing sensitive information outside the company network. Instead, DLP software needs to be able to contextually identify emerging use cases or outliers in order to reduce risk and avert data breaches.
