If your company stores personally identifiable information, or sensitive data of any kind, you’re going to need to have robust data security to ensure you are protected from insider threats, malware, rogue administrators and other data breaches.
IT teams must implement third-party data breach detection and prevention solutions to detect, prevent and respond to potential security threats. Achieving the required level of data security without the use of a third-party solution is simply not feasible. Without real time monitoring solutions, you would simply not be able to spot and react to a threat in a reasonable amount of time – and the longer a threat goes undetected, the more damage it can potentially do.
In this blog, we will go through how you can use the Lepide Data Security Platform to detect data breaches, prevent data breaches, and respond to data breaches.
How Lepide Helps to Prevent a Data Breach
Due to the nature of data breaches, they are almost impossible to prevent altogether. However, there are many things we can do to improve our prevention posture.
Essentially, if you want to reduce the risk of suffering a data breach, you need to first ensure that your infrastructure is operating on a zero-trust policy. This is where users are only given access rights to the data they need to perform their jobs. The objective is to limit access to sensitive data in order to narrow your potential attack surface. Using Lepide, you can report on current and historic permissions and identify which of your users hold excessive permissions. Once you’ve identified those users, you can revoke their permissions and immediately reduce your risk.
But, you may ask, how do I know where my sensitive data is in order to implement this zero-trust policy? Lepide Data Security Platform will allow you to discover and classify sensitive data on an ongoing basis to ensure that you have complete visibility over where your risks are. If a user modifies a file by adding sensitive data, Lepide will immediately determine that this file is now sensitive, so that you can apply the correct access controls.
As I said before, we can’t prevent data breaches altogether, but we can use Lepide Data Security Platform to help reduce risks by limiting our potential attack surface.
How Lepide Helps Detect a Data Breach
There are certain key indicators of a data breach that, if we know what to look for, can be easily identified using a Data Security Platform such as Lepide.
One of the most common indicators of a data breach would be a large number of failed logons. Failed logons could indicate that an attacker is trying to access your network, especially if the account in question holds high permissions. Only reporting on failed logons, however, doesn’t give us much context. Lepide Data Security Platform can make use of threshold alerting to alert on when a large number of failed logons occurs over a very short period of time, which could be an indication of a brute force attack from malware.
The same threshold alerting can be used to detect the spread of ransomware in your file systems. Many forms of ransomware encrypt files by modifying extensions. The Lepide Data Security Platform can detect when a large number of file modifications take place over a short period of time. There are limitless uses for threshold alerts to help you detect common data breach symptoms.
On top of this, Lepide Data Security Platform makes use of machine learning to determine a baseline for “normal” user behavior. Then, after a learning period, the solution can alert you when user behavior deviates from this norm. The solution can even detect single point anomalies and makes use of proximity scanning to remove false positives from the reporting. This is essential when it comes to detecting a data breach, as you will want to be aware when a user accesses or copies a file containing sensitive data for the first time.
How Lepide Helps Respond to a Data Breach
On top of real time detection and data protection functionality, Lepide Data Security Platform also helps you avoid the potentially devastating consequences of a data breach through automated response.
Let’s say, for example, you were using Lepide to detect ransomware spread (as we mentioned in the last section) and an alert was triggered that suggested an ongoing attack. Using Lepide, you could ensure that a custom script is executed on receipt of this alert to shut down the associated account or, if necessary, shut down the server. That way, you could prevent the spread of ransomware in your systems, and you could do it all without lifting a finger. The “script on alert” feature in Lepide Data Security Platform is a state-of-the-art data breach response tool and, if used to its full potential, can help you drastically reduce response times and mitigate damages.
If you’re unfortunate enough to experience a data breach that results in a breach of compliance, then you can use Lepide to help you prove that you were acting responsibly when it came to data security. Lepide could also help you with the investigation of the incident through their detailed audit trail, enabling you to determine why a data breach happened, what data was affected and ensure that the same breach cannot happen again. This kind of response could potentially help you avoid hefty non-compliance fines.
If you would like to see in person how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help you prevent, detect and respond to data breaches, schedule a demo with one of our engineers today.