Data Loss Prevention Trends To Watch In 2008

Most businesses often have more data than they know what to do with. In order to control copious amounts of information, companies will increasingly put resources into classification -- determining what data needs protection and what only serves a liability to the company.

"I think people will take another look at reducing the amount of data that they have," said Julian. "If it doesn't need to be on that system at all, let's just delete it. That will be another trend."

As a result, businesses will be a lot more likely to invest in security risk assessment and management in 2008, security experts say. For enterprises, this means creating data security czars and developing a system that prioritizes the most sensitive information in order to determine what data potential attackers are most likely going to target.

In addition to credit card and Social Security numbers, security experts predict that many companies will add intellectual property, as well as other information that could affect the value of its stock, to their list of sensitive data.

"The big thing holding up organizations is that they believe they know what the sensitive data is and they know who should and shouldn't see it. Every company's sensitive data is different," said Lakhani. "Every company has information that if it gets into the wrong hands would really hurt shareholder value."

DLP vendors will also introduce tools that will help companies learn where the most sensitive information is located, what information is leaking out of the company and to whom.

"It's not just data. You have to classify everything from a risk perspective," said Brian Cleary, vice president of marketing at access governance firm Aveksa. "Once you have those controls in place, the likelihood of losing that data goes down exponentially."

Accidental Agents of Catastrophe

While outside threats will always be a problem, studies have shown that the biggest threat by far to a company's information often occurs through simple human error. A recent survey conducted by RSA, a security solutions provider for businesses, indicated that some of the most significant breaches in 2008 will probably come from within the company itself and will likely be an accident. With even more data in motion, breaches will occur when employees perform risky, but well intentioned, behaviors, such as sending work documents to personal e-mail addresses, or accessing e-mail from a personal computer.

"We tend to think of information risk or data exposure as cloak and dagger stuff," said Sam Curry, vice president of product management and marketing at RSA. "But there's a simpler one, the innocent risk. It's stuff that could more easily be blocked and it's a fundamentally human thing."

The RSA study showed that insider job shifts also played a significant role in compromised data. An overwhelming majority -- 72 percent of respondents -- reported that their company or organization employs temporary workers or contractors who require access to sensitive information and systems. Increased outsourcing and offshoring will also open more avenues for data leakage, and security experts anticipate more security breaches will be ultimately be traced to outsourced or contracted workers throughout the year.

In addition, almost 25 percent of RSA's respondents said that they had stumbled into an area of their corporate network to which they should not have had access and 33 percent said they still had access to old accounts after switching jobs internally.

Subsequently, security experts say that it will become increasingly necessary for businesses to conduct periodic reviews of employment shifts in order to understand the various users, their roles and the type of information they can access. They also maintain that businesses will be required to closely monitor role shifts within a company and ensure that employees only have as much access to information as is necessary in order to perform job duties.

"Users should have no more access than is required to do their job, that's the model we should be thinking about," said Cleary. "The internal inappropriate access is much more common, and typically we see that stemming from an employee's role changing within a company"

"Everyone thinks it's about these Russian networks. They're out there, but it's also just human error," Cleary added.