Data exfiltration, also known as data theft or data exportation, is the transfer of sensitive data to unauthorized parties or destinations with the intent to cause malicious damage or reap financial gains.

What causes data exfiltration?

Data exfiltration can be caused by malicious outsiders or insider threats due to the following:

• External attacks that managed to penetrate a system
• Unintentional or negligent data exposure by an employee
• Threats caused by a malicious insider
• Credential thefts

External malicious cybercriminals cause the majority of data exfiltration acts. However, according to the 2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report conducted by the Ponemon Institute, insider threats have increased in both frequencies and cost over the past two years, with credential thefts almost doubling since 2020. And according to the same study, 56% of incidents experienced by organizations represented in this research were due to negligence. The average annual cost to remediate these incidents was $6.6 million.

How do you prevent data from being stolen?

There are different ways an MSP can prevent data from being stolen from client systems, but the main ones are as follows:

1. Implement a total cybersecurity solution to prevent, detect, and block attacks on business environments that aim to exfiltrate data. The answer should span across all stages of the NIST framework to ensure threats stay out of your client environments and allow you to efficiently remediate risk and recover any affected data.
2. Harden the environment in the event the threat gets passed the detection mechanisms to ensure that sensitive data cannot be easily exfiltrated. You can accomplish this with a data loss prevention (DLP) technology that controls dataflows to prevent exfiltration via common network channels and peripheral devices.
3. Use an identity access and management solution that provides rigorous rules to govern access to sensitive data and enable monitoring and reporting on who can access this data and when.
4. Store sensitive data in secure locations, such as internal file sync and share solutions, to limit access.
5. Keep all software applications continuously updated to close vulnerability gaps.
6. Implement a zero-trust architecture for environments with susceptible data.
7. Use VPN to limit the change of man-in-the-middle attacks while browsing.

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