(by Todd Feinman, CEO and Founder Spirion) Equifax allowed 143 million Social Security Numbers (SSN), Names, Date of Birth (DOB), and other personally identifiable information (PII) to be stolen. This affects most of us personally because we all have financial accounts (e.g., credit card, bank account, mortgage, car lease) and it’s highly likely Equifax was the recipient of your SSN from a bank who ran a credit report on you…
(by Cory Retherford, Spirion user) Greetings! I am a Solution Engineer for Spirion, LLC. My adventure using the data security software began in 2007 as the Indiana University Technology Services Manager for Student Enrollment Services. We had an organizational mission to provide a solution that would allow a better understanding of our data footprint and the types of data existing on our workstations, servers, and websites. As it happens, fate guided me to the…
Classified data is data that has been tagged with information that identifies it by specific attributes that allow people and technologies to treat it in a specific way. So, what makes data sensitive and how can you determine how sensitive it is and when and how to classify it? Read on to find out. Understanding What Makes Data Sensitive? Sensitive Data is information which, if accessed by an adversary, would…
Data classification is a core component of defining and understanding data that security and risk professionals must protect, as well as identifying the way employees should handle it and the types of security controls that are necessary. Data classification tools, which include manual (user-driven) and automated classification, help organizations apply metadata tags to sensitive data. In the last year, more than half of global security decision makers have implemented data…
Over the next 2 months, we’ll be posting a series of blogs that will share information and best practices garnered from over a decade of experience implementing data discovery and more recent data classification solutions. In this blog series you will learn how to identify data as sensitive, how to define a classification schema and separate your data, the risks of not classifying data balanced with the benefits of a…
Following Spirion’s presentation at RSA 2017, “The Impact of Data Discovery and Data Classification in Information Security” Dr. Larry Ponemon of the Ponemon Institute discusses some of the key findings from “The Importance of DLP in Cybersecurity Defense” Ponemon report. The report, which was published in February of 2017, found significant differences between responses of those that are using a manual approach to mitigate or curtail the leakage of sensitive…
We’ve all heard sports stars and even militaries quote the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu when preparing for a big game or battle. Sun Tzu was a master strategist and completely grasped the concept of deception when facing an opponent. One of the best quotes in his famous book, “The Art of War” regarding deception goes like this: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to…
At the 2016 RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA, Todd Feinman, CEO and Gabriel Gumbs, VP of Product Strategy presented on Sensitive Data Management Maturity – The DLP Missing Link. As a company and with the help of industry professionals, we created a Sensitive Data Maturity Model to help organizations identify where their data is, who owns it, what should be done with it, and how much of it exists….
Sensitive Data Classification Data classification is simple—it entails taking security measures by assigning a level of sensitivity to each piece of information, making it easier to locate and retrieve. Classifying data is essential in enabling enterprises to make sense of their vast amounts of data. Without sensitive data classification, an organization treats all data as if it were the same. You can’t know the level of sensitivity of any specific…
In 2016, we announced Sensitive Data Manager 9.0, our Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution. In addition to offering the highest accuracy of data discovery and data classification, this release adds powerful, custom data discovery capabilities that reduce the burden on IT Security by allowing organizations to locate their unique sensitive data. Sensitive Data Manager 9.0 increases automation of classification and DLP security controls, reaching deep into cloud environments to further data…