What Is Data Security Management?

What is Data Security Management?

Data security management is the practice of protecting valuable business data from cyberattacks. It involves various techniques and strategies to safeguard digital assets like documents, files, and images from cybercriminal activities. Additionally, it addresses the risks posed by insiders, such as disgruntled employees and human error. The data security management process includes implementing security policies, monitoring IT systems for vulnerabilities, and applying best practices throughout the organization. It also includes encouraging developers to adhere to data security standards, securing data exchanged with external applications or services, and training individuals on data security practices

Key Components of Data Security Management

Many organizations rely on established cybersecurity models for data security management, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which consists of five key functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover.

1. Identify: This involves classifying physical and software assets, evaluating the supply chain for risks, and creating a risk management strategy. It also involves identifying security policies and vulnerabilities and establishing risk tolerances.
2. Protect: This focuses on safeguarding identity management and access control, providing training for staff, establishing data security measures based on the risk strategy, and implementing processes and procedures to protect organizational resources. It also includes managing protective technology to ensure the security and resilience of systems and assets.
3. Detect: This component defines activities to identify cybersecurity events and enable timely discovery. This includes detecting anomalies and events, implementing continuous security monitoring, and ensuring the effectiveness of protective measures. It also involves maintaining detection processes to be aware of abnormal events.
4. Respond: This component supports containing the impact of potential cybersecurity incidents. It involves executing response planning processes, managing communications, conducting analysis for effective response and recovery, and implementing mitigation activities. It also includes incorporating lessons learned into future detection and response activities.
5. Recover: This component focuses on maintaining resilience and restoring capabilities or services. It includes implementing recovery planning processes and procedures, making improvements, and managing communication during and after recovering from a cybersecurity incident.

Key Threats to Data Security

From malware attacks to data breaches and insider threats, the potential risks to data integrity and confidentiality are substantial. Below is a summary of the most common threats to data security:

Social Engineering

This involves exploiting people’s trust, weaknesses, and naivety to convince them to take certain actions or divulge private data that can be used for various malicious purposes. This could include tricking someone into revealing their passwords, granting unauthorized access to systems, or even performing fraudulent financial transactions. Social engineering uses various tactics such as impersonation, pretexting, and phishing to manipulate victims into believing they are engaging with a trustworthy entity or aiding a legitimate cause.

Hacking

Hacking involves exploiting vulnerabilities in software, hardware, or even human behavior to gain control over digital assets and information. Hacking is performed by Hackers, who have different motivations, including profit, protest, gathering information, or simply testing and improving security measures.

Cracking

The act of “cracking” refers to the endeavor of gaining unauthorized access to computer systems with the intention of stealing, manipulating, or improperly accessing data. Although the media commonly uses the term “hacking” to describe these activities, hackers perceive themselves as accomplished and skillful programmers and argue that such illicit behavior should be labeled as “cracking.”

Malware

Malware refers to software that aims to disrupt computers or networks, expose private data, gain unauthorized access, block access to information, or unintentionally compromise a user’s computer security and privacy. Examples of malware include Ransomware, Spyware, Adware, Trojan horses, worms.

Insider threats

An insider threat is essentially an individual with authorized access to an organization’s network, applications, or databases, who engages in malicious activities. This can include current or former employees, contractors, or temporary workers. It can also entail compromised service accounts. While typically associated with intentional harm, an insider threat can also involve unintentional actions that cause damage to the organization. For example, system misconfigurations, programming errors or the unauthorized transmission of data to external sources, could result in a data breach.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)

Unlike traditional cyber attacks, APTs are characterized by their long duration, stealthy nature, and ability to persistently infiltrate and target an organization’s network. These threats are often sponsored by nation-states or well-resourced criminal organizations and are motivated by strategic, political, or financial gain. APTs aim to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information, disrupt operations, steal intellectual property, or conduct espionage. They typically involve multiple stages, including reconnaissance, initial compromise, maintaining persistence, lateral movement, data exfiltration, and potential future exploitation. Due to their elaborate and persistent nature, APTs require advanced threat hunting, detection, and mitigation techniques to safeguard against their potential impacts.

Third-party risk

In this context, third parties could include suppliers, vendors, contractors, service providers, etc. Risks can arise due to various factors, such as inadequate security measures, unethical practices, data breaches, compliance failures, financial instability, or even a lack of service quality. Organizations need to thoroughly evaluate and monitor their relationships with third parties to manage these risks effectively.

How Lepide Helps with Data Security Management

The Lepide Data Security Platform helps with data security management by detecting and responding to threats, governing access to sensitive data, and identifying risky user behavior. It offers data discovery and classification, privileged access management, and active directory cleanup features. Lepide uses machine learning algorithms to detect and alert on unusual user behavior, and provides insights into security incidents. Additionally, it allows for easy rollback of unauthorized changes to Active Directory and Group Policy.

If you’d like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help to facilitate data security management, schedule a demo with one of our engineers or start your free trial today.