Defining Network Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
Network Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software monitors, detects and potentially blocks sensitive data exfiltration while the data is in motion. Network DLP is used to prevent critical information from being transferred outside the corporate network and it’s enforced in some regulated industries where compliance requirements are in place to ensure organizations are able to demonstrate adequate care has been taken to avert the loss or theft of confidential and sensitive information.
How Does Network DLP Work?
Network DLP solutions are designed to monitor, detect, and prevent unauthorized data transfers across a network. Here’s an overview of how these systems operate.
It scans data packets for sensitive data, much like a digital security scanner. DLP, though, does more than merely view the information. It lets you create rules that specify how to deal with it. These regulations can include everything from completely stopping questionable transfers to encrypting private information for safe delivery or informing administrators so they can look into the matter further.
Through content analysis of emails, files, and attachments, DLP can find private information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and company secrets. This multi-pronged strategy helps protect sensitive information belonging to your company from malevolent external actors and unintentional employee loss.
The systems that aid a Network DLP solution to work are:
- Traffic Monitoring
- Content Inspection
- Policy Enforcement
- Contextual Analysis
- Response Mechanisms
- Reporting and Analytics
Why is Network Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Important?
Network DLP capabilities are critical to support compliance, protect intellectual property (IP), and augment employee security awareness. Network DLP is important for detecting and preventing accidental data loss, as well as preventing malicious insiders from intentionally exfiltrating data from the corporate network.
Organizations use network DLP capabilities to support the following use cases:
- Support regulatory compliance efforts around data protection where network DLP is used to detect and prevent compliance policy violations around data movement – and ultimately preventing sensitive data from being transferred out from the corporate network.
- Protect intellectual property from being exfiltrated from the corporate network.
- Visibility of sensitive data and augment employee security awareness. Unintentional policy violations can result in a notification to the user with an explanation to help train proper behavior.
What are the Key Aspects of a Network Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Solution?
While detection is clearly an important role in network DLP, being able to prevent sensitive data from leaving the network is the ultimate goal.
- Conduct session-level (not packet-level) inspection of network traffic across all 65,535 network ports. Given most human-readable data in an enterprise is not in plain text formats, visibility requires knowledge beyond an individual packet for network DLP decisions.
- Provide visibility into the protocols, channels, and applications in use on the network. Network data loss prevention solutions need to understand a wide variety of network traffic to determine how people are communicating and extract information for analysis.
- Ability to extract enterprise human-readable content and related metadata contained within sessions as well as any attachments and compressed files for analysis.
- Provide multiple sophisticated content analysis technologies to detect sensitive and/or protected information for accurate content recognition.
- Provide a policy engine to implement rules to determine network sessions that violate policy. Policy-based enforcement maps rules to an organization’s content disclosure or network use policies.
What are the key threats that Network DLP can Defend?
Network DLP fortifies your cyber territory against a variety of threats that could result in the loss of confidential data. Here are some of the key areas it helps protect:
- Malicious Insider Threats: Sensitive information may be attempted to be stolen or leaked by resentful workers or those acting maliciously. Data Loss Prevention Monitoring staff behavior and identifying questionable efforts to transmit sensitive data are two ways that Network DLP might be helpful.
- Cloud Misconfigurations: In order to prevent sensitive data from being unintentionally exposed due to misconfigurations, Network based DLP can assist by monitoring data flows to and from cloud services.
- External Intrusion: Cybercriminals and hackers frequently target networks in an effort to steal sensitive data. By identifying efforts to exfiltrate data via malware, phishing emails, or illegal access points, network data loss prevention (DLP) can be an essential line of defense.
About Fidelis Network Data Loss Prevention Solution
Fidelis Security’s Patented Deep Session Inspection technology gives you the ability to investigate threats and stop sessions that violate policies with details about who is sending and receiving data and what type of data is being sent. DLP security with Fidelis prevents data loss for your enterprise by:
- Extracting metadata and monitoring 300+ different attributes
- Providing increased data visibility
- Investigating how and why your data moves
- Preventing data theft or unauthorized sharing
- Safeguarding IP and business reputation
- Ensuring compliance
The 'Network DLP buyers Guide' will help decision makers be more aware before approving the Purchase order for a Network Data Loss Prevention solution. To know more fill out the form to get your guide and make the best choice.
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