Shaun is an IT employee who works at damesIT (The names and characters are purely fictional). He walks into the company like on any regular day, only that it wasn’t any other day, his colleagues were scrambling around to find what happened to the systems. When Shaun asks around, he finds that there was a huge data breach and customer data was leaked to a third-party site.
To make things worse, it was later found that he was the reason for the data breach. Thinking back Shaun realizes a while ago he received a gift card on his personal email, which he opened on his office laptop to fill up a form for redeeming the gift card. Well, he did receive the gift card money, but what he did not realize at that time is that he lost all the important customer information.
It would be easy to point fingers at Shaun, since his mistake led to the breach, but was it completely his fault? Leaving the employee devices unmanaged/unmonitored can be troublesome since it is almost impossible to discern malicious sites and e-mails from their safe counterparts.
It was found that 82% of breaches involved the human element, including social attacks, errors and misuse. This only shows to prove that a breach of this sort is the most common type. Sure, employees can be briefed on safe usage of the internet, but hackers are getting increasingly better at disguising their sites as legitimate websites. The best way to go about a breach is to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place. That’s where data loss prevention comes in.
Data loss prevention: Securing your sensitive data
Know more about the best practices to secure your sensitive data.
What is Data loss prevention?
Data loss prevention, also known as data leak prevention, is a program that uses a combination of technology, techniques, and procedures to prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing a company’s sensitive information. DLP also refers to network administrators’ tools and procedures to monitor and regulate data transmission. This reduces the risk of employees sharing confidential information outside the company.
How do you prevent data loss?
Starting, you have to identify your data protection goal, i.e., what are you trying to protect; Is it intellectual property, everyday data transfer, etc.
Classify your company’s structured and unstructured data. This helps know the vital information that needs excess protection.
Make a cyber security plan that involves regular audits, monitoring and screening for discrepancies.
Having a cybersecurity policy can help the company focus on its security goals. Have documentation that clearly describes the initial approach and set measurable goals.
Manage access by ensuring the relevant information is accessible only to the relevant person; this helps security and accountability.
Educating and training your employees about good cyber hygiene is one way of avoiding most malware attacks.
Multiple DLP tools in the market aid you in managing your data in a better and more secure way. This software can be broadly classified into three types.
Classification of DLP
Cloud DLP
Cloud DLP is crucial as businesses move their corporate data and apps to the cloud. It ensures that business-critical workloads are not leaked, lost, or mistreated. In addition, cloud DLP solutions secure your data in the cloud by encrypting critical information and ensuring that it is only transferred to cloud apps that your organization has approved.
Network DLP
Network DLP solutions provide:
More insight into your company’s network.
Allowing you to monitor and regulate information flow via the network.
Email.
The web.
DLP software analyses network traffic and establish security policies to reduce data loss risks while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Endpoint DLP software gives granular control over the device to the IT admin. Endpoints like desktops, mobiles etc., are managed by enrolling them with endpoint DLP solutions. They keep track of the servers, PCs, laptops, and mobile devices where your company’s sensitive data is utilized, transported and stored. This protects your sensitive information from being lost or abused by unauthorized parties.
Most data loss prevention goals can be achieved using a capable UEM like Hexnode.
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Why Hexnode UEM
We realize that your modern problems require an equally modern solution. Hexnode UEM helps you cover every possible aspect of comprehensive device management.
What is Hexnode, and how can it help your DLP plan?
Hexnode is a Unified Endpoint Management system to manage endpoints from a single console. It provides a comprehensive mobility management solution that works with all the primary OS.
Data loss prevention plan
Managing your corporate devices is an effective way to gain control over all the devices in your organization. Hexnode supports various security features to protect corporate data and deploy DLP policies on corporate devices.
Restrictions
Through Hexnode, an IT admin has the option to restrict functionalities on office devices. Furthermore, these restrictions can be tailored to the employee. I.e., IT admin can restrict access to the user’s camera for an employee working in a secret facility.
Hexnode has a feature to enable password policies on enrolled devices. This lets the IT admins place restrictions on the passwords that users are allowed to select, like restricting users from reusing passwords and setting policies to ensure users place strong passwords. This way, users are forced to follow healthy password hygiene.
Blacklisting: Through Hexnode, you can blacklist apps; when an IT admin blocks an app, the user is restricted access to the app/site that was blacklisted. This way, a corporate can block potentially malicious or unproductive sites.
Whitelist: Whitelisting is the counterpart of blacklisting. Here, when a website is added to the whitelist, the user is granted access only to the sites that are mentioned in the whitelist. This is an effective way to block all the sites that are not required for work. Multiple malicious sites and apps appear every day; it is impossible to blacklist each one of them, and having a whitelist is an effective fix to this problem.
Since the Pandemic, organizations have adopted remote work, and it has been found that after everything passes, the percentage of employees returning to the office will be significantly lesser than pre-pandemic. While the repercussions of such a permanent change are debatable, it is a well-known fact that remote work is not the safest option for the data of corporates.
Bring your own device (BYOD) is an effective way for corporations to deploy remote work to employees. This is when corporates allow the users to work from their devices. It takes no genius to discern the advantages of remote work and BYOD. The corporate saves up costs on buying hardware, and the user need not face the hassle of switching between devices.
When users use their devices, they have access to everything on the internet that can attack the device. It is a huge problem for IT since a single breach can compromise the entire corporate. To tackle this issue, Hexnode has the feature to create work containers.
This means that, by having work and personal profiles, the user can switch between both modes, so work and personal data are stored differently on the same device. Making the function and threat of each kind of data independent of the other
Set up a Wi-Fi network for the devices to connect automatically to them, without prompting for the password. This helps the corporate keep its Wi-Fi anonymous from potential insider threats.
VPN sends all data through a private network and improves security. In addition, there are multiple features like VPN on demand, constantly on VPN and per-app VPN. This gives you control over the specific data that is transferred.
With Hexnode, you can, automatically update OS. Updates fix the bugs from earlier patches; this fixes any vulnerabilities that an app might. Not updating the app can lead to bad actors exploiting these bugs and breaching systems.
This is a useful feature in the corporate to keep all the devices synced. Meaning, it gives granular control to the admin over all the device updates and lets them update devices at their discretion.
Conclusion
Circling back to why we’re here first, Shaun! So what would have happened if Shaun’s device was Hexnode managed?
The malware could have gone undetected for many reasons; the native web browser might be outdated, which let the malware through; if Hexnode was ever there, the updates could’ve been remotely installed. But wait, before this even happens, even if the malicious site is undetected by the web browser, through Hexnode’s whitelist policy, the corporate can block the NSFW sites.
A UEM software against cyber security threats is as essential as execution to strategy.
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