Monitoring Data Flows and Detecting Leaks
How to detect data leaks in real time
Monitoring data flows means gaining visibility into how sensitive information moves inside and outside the organization, between internal systems, to external vendors, and to employees' personal devices or services, in order to detect patterns suggesting a leak in progress, whether intentional or accidental. This requires combining tools such as DLP, network traffic analysis and event correlation across different systems, since a leak rarely announces itself with a single obvious signal, but rather with scattered hints such as an unusual volume of data leaving by email, followed by access to a repository that user doesn't usually consult. Early detection makes an enormous difference in an incident's impact: the sooner a leak is identified, the smaller the volume of compromised data and the faster the containment, while without active monitoring many leaks are only discovered when the data already appears published or for sale.