As security practitioners, we often get caught up worrying about protecting against the latest threat or patching the latest zero-day, however we should spend at least an equal amount of time understanding the data risks of our users and how to offer both better visibility into endpoint data usage, as well as guidance into good data protection practices.
There are a number of different products and vendors that touch on these aspects, but there is no one-stop shop for data protection, and likely never will be. DLP, or Data Loss Prevention, can look at known content types for matches and take protective actions. However, most DLP deployments never moved beyond monitoring due to over-blocking or false positive concerns. Endpoint employee monitoring can take good forensic information, even screenshots to recreate evidence of either inappropriate data usage, or other significant events, though these types of technology are often cumbersome, hard to realize the value and present some serious privacy and ethical concerns. EDR or Endpoint Detection and Response is very threat-focused, with a severe limit on data visibility, and often does little more than capture a checksum of a file, with no content inspection or awareness. UEBA, or User and Entity Behavior Analytics, can often be deployed in conjunction with SIEM or log management capabilities to get a better contextual view of your organization, however, you must first have some semblance of “normal” or a baseline before you can uncover abnormal.
Organizations should begin building the case for stronger endpoint data visibility. This improved data visibility must be easy to use, fast to provide actionable answers, not impede other endpoint security capabilities, and most importantly provide the financial impact of endpoint data and the decisions that users make with that data.
