Understanding Data Exfiltration and How Concentric AI Can Help Prevent It

October 5, 2023
Cyrus Tehrani
4 min read

As businesses continue migrating to the cloud in monumental numbers, the challenges associated with securing sensitive data grow exponentially. With all this data to manage, data exfiltration is a significant threat to organizations — which can lead to operational disruptions, financial losses, and reputational damage.

What is data exfiltration?

Data exfiltration refers to the unauthorized transfer or leakage of sensitive information from an organization to external entities. Exfiltration can be initiated by individuals inside the organization — such as employees, contractors, or business partners — or by external actors like a hacker or cybercriminal.

The motives behind data exfiltration are typically malicious, with include selling the data on the dark web, holding data for ransom, or using it for some sort of competitive advantage.

What are some of the more common data exfiltration techniques?

External attacks and exploitation: Malicious individuals or groups exploit system or operational vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Outbound email: Using emails to send sensitive information to external recipients.

Phishing and social engineering: Deceptive techniques that trick individuals into revealing confidential information or granting access to restricted systems and data.

Insider threats: Employees with authorized access to sensitive data could misuse it for malicious purposes.

Downloads to insecure devices: Transferring data from a secure network to an insecure device like a USB drive.

Insecure cloud interface: Internal administrators with access to cloud storage can exfiltrate data easily.

What are the key data exfiltration concerns?

Valuable data assets: Modern organizations store vast amounts of data, including intellectual property, financial records, employee details, and customer information. Because this data is highly valuable, it’s a prime target for theft.

Sophistication of attackers: Cybercriminals today can leverage a myriad of advanced techniques to infiltrate networks, often remaining undetected for long periods. Their stealthy approach gives them the opportunity to identify, extract, and transfer valuable data.

Insider threats: Employees or insiders — whether driven by malicious intent, financial incentives, or simple negligence — can contribute to the data exfiltration problem. Plus, their familiarity with the organization’s infrastructure can make their activities harder to detect.

Digital transformation: As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-based solutions, the potential points of vulnerability multiply. Cloud storage, remote and hybrid work setups, and interconnected devices all offer new avenues for data to be extracted.

How Can Concentric AI Help prevent data exfiltration?

The TLDR is this: Concentric AI offers a robust Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution that provides visibility into your sensitive data, identifies risks, and prevents data loss.

Here’s a deep dive into how does Concentric AI prevents data exfiltration.

Autonomous, Semantic-Based Data Discovery

Deep learning AI technologies: Concentric AI leverages advanced deep learning technologies for language analysis, which helps understand the context and semantics of the data. It’s important to note that this process goes beyond mere pattern matching or rule-based methods.     

The end of manual rules: Traditional data protection methods often rely on manually created rules, which can be cumbersome to maintain and may not identify all potential threats. Concentric AI’s semantic-based approach eliminates this need, ensuring more comprehensive and up-to-date data protection.

Identification of business-critical data: With autonomous data discovery, Concentric AI can effortlessly identify business-critical and sensitive data, even if it’s not explicitly labeled or categorized.

Adaptability: As business data evolves and grows, Concentric AI’s system adapts and learns on the go, ensuring that new types of sensitive data are promptly identified and protected.

Automated Data Risk Identification and Remediation

Risk Distance™ analysis: Our proprietary functionality compares each data element against baseline security practices used by similar datasets. This process can identify deviations or anomalies that might indicate a security risk.

Real-time threat detection: Concentric AI understands the dynamic nature of data threats. Our solution operates in real-time, identifying potential data threats as they emerge.

Proactive remediation: When a potential threat or unauthorized data access is identified, Concentric AI can take proactive measures to remediate the issue — whether that’s changing access permissions, notifying security teams, or other appropriate actions to remediate risk.

Deep learning insights: Leveraging advanced deep learning technology, Concentric AI offers insights that go beyond traditional rule-based solutions, taking the unique risk profile of each data element into consideration.

Effortless Implementation

Agentless, API-based solution: Concentric AI’s solution is designed for seamless integration. With our agentless solution, there’s no need to install software on individual devices. This means no more compatibility issues and a streamlined deployment process.

Comprehensive data coverage: Whether data resides in the cloud, on-premises, in structured databases, or unstructured repositories, Concentric AI ensures secure access and monitoring of all data in all locations.

No more manual rules: With Concentric AI, organizations can say goodbye to cumbersome rule and regex-based systems. Our autonomous capabilities allow for minimal end-user involvement, streamlining the data protection process.

Rapid deployment and value delivery: Concentric AI is easy to implement and designed to deliver value quickly. Organizations can see tangible benefits in days, not months, without any significant upfront work.

Want to see firsthand — with your own data — how you can quickly and easily deploy Concentric AI’s solution to leverage the power of AI to prevent data exfiltration? Book a demo today and experience the freedom of protecting your data without rules, regex, or end-user involvement.

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