Network Data Loss Prevention – Maintaining a Secure Network

Your network is one of your major cyber attack vulnerability surfaces. It’s typically at capacity, with data flowing from point to point, with users able to access it from outside the firewall. As a result, your network is an ideal venue for data loss by way of malicious actors, nefarious insiders, and well-intentioned but careless employees.

What can be done about this risk? Network data loss prevention (DLP) offers a solution and reduces the likelihood of a data breach or a compliance problem resulting from a network-based data breach. This article explains how network DLP works and why it’s an essential element of an effective cybersecurity strategy.

What is Network Data Loss Prevention?

Network data loss prevention comprises a mix of practices, processes, tools, and policies that have the collective goal of preventing the unauthorized exfiltration of network data.

It’s a subset of DLP, a $2 billion segment of the security business predicted to rise to to $7 billion by 2030 (via Research And Markets). Its purpose is the overall detection and prevention of data loss. DLP in networking is one of three predominant modes of data loss prevention. There is also DLP on endpoints and in the cloud.

Approaches and specifics for network DLP vary widely, but most network data loss prevention programs include network monitoring and assessing how users interact with data across the network. It may involve inspecting data packets on the networks to detect possibly unauthorized transport of sensitive information.

For example, a DLP network solution might examine email attachments and flag ones that violate policies against sharing data outside the organization.

How Network Data Loss Prevention Works

To understand how data loss prevention in network security works, it’s important to realize that it is not a single control or practice. Rather, it’s a group of controls and technological functions working together.

Usually, network DLP starts with the deployment of network data loss prevention software that enables security managers to define NDLP policies that do things like prohibit copying and pasting data, to name one of many examples.

Enterprise network data loss prevention takes the process further, with in-depth monitoring of network traffic across all ports and spanning file transfer protocol (FTP), webmail, and so forth. It may also block web applications if they pose a threat to data.

DLP networking solutions cover two broad categories of data:

• Data in use: This includes data that’s actively being accessed and shared, e.g., copying data from a document into a generative AI (GenAI) chatbot.
• Data in motion, i.e., data in transit: This data moving across the network, such as an email with a document attachment or a database being replicated.

10 Key Features of Network Data Loss Prevention

Network data loss prevention performs many functions and also connects with other areas of security policy and security operations (SecOps).

Getting the DLP network to work involves best practices that often intervene and modify the data itself. Here are 10 such key features of network data loss prevention.

1. Data Identification and Classification

One of the first tasks required for effective DLP networking is to establish what kinds of data are moving across the network in the first place.

A network data loss prevention solution will typically offer functionality for identifying and classifying data by analyzing network traffic.

For example, it will know how to spot personally identifiable information (PII) or health records that could cause compliance problems if breached. Or, the solution will know to flag intellectual property (IP) or other private, valuable data as it makes its way through the network.

2. Network Monitoring

Data loss prevention monitoring is critical to success with network DLP and can be achieved with a  robust network monitoring tool that analyzes network traffic flow.

This should happen in real time and involve inspection at the network packet level. The process should study inbound and outbound network traffic. Both can be relevant. For example, a data request from an external source can signal the start of a data breach.

3. Policy Enforcement

Network-based DLP solutions enforce data protection policies. An example might be a policy that blocks data from being copied to an external cloud storage volume.

It’s a two-stop process that starts with policy definition. In this case, the policy says, “Do not copy data to an external cloud-based system such as box.com”, for network DLP to work, however, the solution has to be able to enforce that policy, such as by detecting when someone is trying to copy data to box.com—and stopping them from doing so, perhaps through an automatic blocking control.

Network monitoring tools can also be put to good use here. The configuration management set up within the software can download and check that network device configuration matches the organization’s policies. If there is any configuration on a device that violates these policies and negatively impacts data loss prevention, then it will raise an alert.

4. Encryption

Encryption protects data in transit from unauthorized eavesdropping. If it’s intercepted, the data is unreadable. Network DLP solutions often enable encryption to support anti data leaking policies.

5. Anonymization

Anonymizing data makes it less valuable to attackers and reduces the impact of a data breach on compliance. The process involves substituting generic placeholders for sensitive data, such as replacing a Social Security number with 000-00-000.

6. Incident Response

Network DLP solutions have their own set of incident response capabilities, such as the ability to shut off a port or block data from moving across the network. They also generally connect with other incident response solutions, such as Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) or IT Infrastructure automation.

Through such integrations, incident response teams and workflows benefit from rapidly knowing exactly what data was affected by an attack and what has already been done to remediate the breach.

7. Forensics

A network data loss prevention solution can be a valuable source of forensics for incident response and post-incident remediation processes. For instance, a network DLP solution might show that an encryption module failed, causing data to become vulnerable to breach on the network.

Knowing this detail helps the incident response team quickly fix that problem. It saves a lot of time for everyone.

8. Compliance

Preventing data loss is often part of complying with regulations. Even if the compliance rules don’t specify network DLP, the practice of deploying network DLP demonstrates a commitment to protecting data as required by the regulations.

Showing such due diligence helps moderate the severity of regulatory consequences in the aftermath of a data breach.

9. Data Governance

Network DLP should ideally be connected with a broader set of data governance rules and data lifecycle policies. Data ownership, for one thing, can be a helpful addition to network DLP.

Knowing who is responsible for securing a particular data set is useful when classifying data and responding to data loss incidents on the network.

10. Insider Threat Mitigation

In some cases, it is insiders who pose a threat of data loss on the network. This is unfortunate, but it is a reality that all experienced data security managers understand.

It is insiders who are best positioned to email sensitive documents outside the organization or post valuable data into cloud-based spreadsheets, and so forth.

These insiders may not be malicious actors, however. They may simply be employees who don’t know the policies. For example, they email a sensitive PDF to an outsider without realizing they’ve just triggered a data loss incident. if there is no policy enforcement, it’s hard to hold them accountable for accidentally violating the policies.

Importance of DLP in Networking

Network-based data loss prevention abilities are important, if for no other reason than it takes an average of seven months for an enterprise to discover that it has a data breach. It should be an essential element of a mature security capability.

Maintaining Strong Security Measures

Protecting data is one of the core missions of cybersecurity. Network DLP is part of the data security mix and it enables a strong security posture.

It Protects the Network

Hackers need a pathway to get to your data, and a pathway to exfiltrate it, and your network is exactly that pathway.

The network in data centers and beyond is where you may be most vulnerable to data loss, unlike servers and storage infrastructure. These can be hardened and closely monitored as closed systems, the network is sprawling, with numerous entry and exit points for data. Network DLP imposes a layer of protection on this high-risk part of your IT estate.

Network Data Loss Threatens Regulatory Compliance

Compliance problems are costly and time-consuming to remediate. They’re also harmful to reputation, and can negatively affect customer relationships.

Improving compliance is another reason a data loss prevention network is important to IT and security teams.

3 Benefits of Network Data Loss Prevention

Done right, network data loss prevention confers a range of benefits on organizations that implement it. In addition to an overall boost to security posture and improved data security, here are three benefits of network DLP:

1. Reducing the Probability of Data Breaches

Effective network data loss prevention reduces the likelihood of a data breach. This is a benefit because data breaches can be extremely expensive to deal with and create a serious distraction that takes people away from other important work.

Data breaches also negatively affect a company’s reputation and put it into conflict with regulatory authorities.

2. Protecting Valuable Data Assets

Your data is a valuable asset. It’s arguably your company’s most valuable property. As a result, a solution that protects it from harm — or losing its value through exfiltration to competitors — is a benefit.

3. Saving Time and Money on Incident Response

Network DLP provides security operations center (SOC) teams with detailed information about the nature of data breaches that occur over the network.

This saves the SOC team time in identifying what happened and what needs to be done about it, as well as what can be done to prevent a similar breach in the future. This is valuable, and a benefit to the entire organization.

Data Loss Prevention in Network Security via Entuity Software™

With network vulnerabilities being a major cause of data breaches within global infrastructures, isn’t it time network data loss prevention software was considered?

Entuity Software™, from Park Place Technologies, is our network monitoring solution designed to track network traffic and identify any security issues before they arise. Our tool detects irregular network traffic and unusual bandwidth utilization, as well as general access to your network, ensuring that these operations do not lead to data breaches or network downtime.

Contact Park Place today to improve your enterprise network processes.