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Prevent Sensitive Data Breaches With Data Detection & Response (DDR)

January 21, 2024
4
 Min Read
Data Security

Amidst the dynamic cybersecurity landscape, the need for advanced Threat Detection and Incident Response (TDIR) solutions has never been more crucial. Traditional tools often focus on addressing the complexities of security without data awareness. This deficiency can result in signal fatigue, and increased time to investigate.

Data Detection and Response (DDR) distinguishes itself by focusing on data-first threats, such as: compromise or manipulation of sensitive databases, unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, intellectual property theft, and many other malicious activities targeting sensitive information. Finally, the obligation to inform and potentially compensate affected parties in compliance with regulatory requirements strengthens the need to enrich TDIR with a data-focused technology.

In this blog, we will start by explaining the difference between data detection and response (DDR) and cloud detection and response (CDR), and how data detection and response (DDR) fits into a cloud data security platform. We will then decode the distinctions between DDR and other TDIR solutions like Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR). Lastly, we will explore why Sentra, with its DDR approach, emerges as a comprehensive and efficient data security solution.

Challenges in Traditional Approaches

Classifying data accurately poses a significant challenge to most traditional cybersecurity approaches. Behavioral analysis, while effective, often overlooks the critical aspect of data type, leading to potential blind spots and excessive false positives. Real-time prevention measures also face limitations, such as they can only protect the platforms they have visibility into, often restricting them to known and managed infrastructure, leaving organizations vulnerable to sophisticated cyber threats that target the public cloud.

Differences Between Data Detection and Response (DDR) and Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)

Cloud detection and response (CDR) solutions focus on overseeing and safeguarding cloud infrastructure, while data detection and response (DDR) specialize in the surveillance and protection of data. DDR plays a crucial role in identifying potential threats to sensitive data, irrespective of its location or format, providing an essential layer of security that goes beyond the capabilities of solutions focusing solely on infrastructure. Additionally, DDR empowers organizations to concentrate on detecting and addressing potential risks to their most sensitive data, reducing noise, cutting costs, and preventing alert fatigue.

When incorporating DDR into a cloud data security platform, organizations should see it as a crucial part of a strategy that encompasses technologies like data security posture management (DSPM), data access governance, and compliance management. This integration enables comprehensive security measures throughout the data lifecycle, enhancing overall cloud data security.

Why do I need a DDR if I’m already using a CDR product?

Data Detection and Response (DDR) is focused on monitoring data access activities that are performed by users and applications, while CDR is focused on infrastructure resources, such as their creation and configuration changes. DDR and CDR serve as detection and response tools, yet they offer distinct sets of threat detection capabilities essential for organizations aiming to prevent cloud data breaches and ransomware attacks.

Some examples where DDR can identify data-centric threats that might go unnoticed by CDR:

  1. Users who download sensitive data types that they don’t usually access.
  2. A ransomware attack in which amounts of business-critical data is being encrypted or deleted.
  3. Users or applications who gain access to sensitive data via a privilege escalation. 
  4. Tampering or poisoning of a Large Language Model (LLM) training dataset by a 3rd party application.
  5. Supply chain attack detection when a compromised third party app is exfiltrating sensitive data from your cloud environment.
  6. Credentials extraction of high-impact keys that have access to sensitive data.

Lastly, DDR offers security operations center (SOC) teams to focus on what matters the most – attacks on their sensitive data, hence reducing the noise and saving time. While CDR detects threats such as impossible travel or brute force log-in attempts on any cloud resources, DDR detects such threats only when the target cloud resources contain sensitive data.

Threat Detection and Incident Response (TDIR) Solutions

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) plays a pivotal role in safeguarding the digital perimeters of organizations. Focused on monitoring and responding to suspicious activities at the endpoint level, EDR solutions are crucial for identifying and neutralizing threats before they escalate. Armed with advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms, EDR empowers technical teams to detect anomalous behavior, conduct thorough investigations, and orchestrate rapid responses to potential security incidents.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a solution designed to fortify organizations against sophisticated threats and extend protection beyond EDR. XDR seamlessly integrates threat intelligence, endpoint detection, and incident response across multiple security layers, offering a unified defense strategy. By aggregating and correlating data from various sources such as servers, applications, and other infrastructure, XDR provides unparalleled visibility into potential threats, enabling rapid detection and response. Its proactive approach enhances incident investigation and remediation, ultimately minimizing the impact of cyber threats across an organization's IT estate.

Enter DDR: Revolutionizing Data Security

Data Detection and Response (DDR) brings real-time threat detection to complement data posture controls, hence combining with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) to address these longstanding challenges. Sentra, a leading player in this domain, ensures real-time data protection across various cloud environments, offering a comprehensive solution to safeguard data wherever it resides. DDR provides a layer of real-time threat detection that is agnostic to infrastructure and works well in multi-cloud environments - it works no matter where data travels.

DDR provides rich near real-time context to complement DSPM. Sentra’s DDR is not dependent on scanning your data. Instead, it continually monitors log activity (ex. AWS CloudTrail events) and can alert on any suspicious or unusual activity such as an exfiltration or unusual access - this can be from a malicious insider or outsider or simply unintended actions from an authorized user or a supply chain partner. Combined with DSPM, DDR provides enhanced context regarding data usage and related exposure. Sentra can help an organization to focus monitoring efforts on areas of greatest risk and reduce the ‘noise’ (false positives or inactionable alarms) from less contextually aware activity monitors.

Proactive and Reactive Data Security with Sentra's DSPM and DDR

Sentra takes a dual-pronged approach, combining proactive and reactive controls to fortify data security at every stage of a potential cyberattack:

  • Weakening Defenses Detection: Continuously monitor for unauthorized changes to data security posture, identifying escalated access privileges or changes in encryption levels.
  • Suspicious Access Detection: Instant alerts are triggered when a third party or insider accesses sensitive information, enabling swift action to prevent potential malicious activities.
  • Reconnaissance: Detect an early stage of the attack when an attacker moves sensitive data across and within cloud networks in order to prepare for the data exfiltration stage.
  • Data Loss and Ransomware Prevention: Real-time monitoring and alerts for accidental or unauthorized data movement, coupled with the enforcement of least privilege data access, prevent potential breaches.
  • Data Exfiltration Detection: Sentra detects anomalous sensitive data movement in near real-time, providing quick notification and remediation before significant damages occur.
  • Breach Recovery Acceleration: In the unfortunate event of a breach, Sentra provides guidance and contextual information, streamlining post-incident analysis and remediation.

Seamless Integration for Enhanced Efficiency

Sentra provides seamless integration into your security workflow. With over 20 pre-built or custom integrations, Sentra ensures that alert context is directly fed to the appropriate teams, expediting issue resolution. This integrated approach enables organizations to respond to potential threats with unmatched speed and efficiency.

Attribute EDR XDR CDR DDR
Monitored environment Endpoints (laptops, desktops, servers, mobile devices) Multiple security layers (endpoints, networks, cloud, email, etc.) Cloud assets and infrastructure Data repositories within the cloud environment
Threat detection method Behavior-based, signature-based, machine learning Correlation of data from multiple sources, machine learning, AI Log analysis, anomaly detection, machine learning Data-aware detection rules and behavioral analysis based on data access
Presence requirement Agent installed on endpoints Integration with multiple security tools Typically agentless, can have agents on cloud resources Typically agentless, Data collection from various sources, not limited to endpoint
Example Vendor CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Trend Micro Vision One, Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR, Cisco SecureX Wiz, Rapid7 InsightIDR, FireEye Helix Sentra DDR, Exabeam, Securonix, LogRhythm


Data Detection and Response (DDR) is not a replacement or superior solution, it is complementary to the others.

Companies need these technologies for different reasons:

  • EDR for endpoint
  • XDR for on premise
  • CDR for cloud infrastructure
  • DDR for cloud data stores
sensitive data that was accessed from suspicious IP address

With Sentra, organizations get the best of both worlds – proactive and reactive controls integrated for complete data protection. Sentra combines DDR with powerful Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), allowing users to detect and remediate data security risks efficiently. It's time to revolutionize data security with Sentra’s Data Detection and Response (DDR) – your comprehensive solution to safeguarding your most valuable asset: your data.

To learn more, schedule a demo with one of our data security experts.

David is a Director of Product Management at Sentra, with 15 years experience in the tech industry. Prior to his current role, David worked in the Microsoft Cybersecurity division, securing organizations' sensitive data assets and building bridge between developers and security operations in the Microsoft's CNAPP solution.

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Team Sentra
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Spooky Stories of Data Breaches

Spooky Stories of Data Breaches

As Halloween approaches, it’s the perfect time to dive into some of the scariest data breaches of 2024. Just like monsters hiding in haunted houses, cyber threats quietly move through the digital world, waiting to target vulnerable organizations.

The financial impact of cyberattacks is immense. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates global cybercrime will reach $9.5 trillion in 2024 and $10.5 trillion by 2025. Ransomware, the top threat, is projected to cause damages from $42 billion in 2024 to $265 billion by 2031.

If those numbers didn’t scare you, the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report highlights that out of 30,458 cyber incidents, 10,626 were confirmed data breaches, with one-third involving ransomware or extortion. Ransomware has been the top threat in 92% of industries and, along with phishing, malware, and DDoS attacks, has caused nearly two-thirds of data breaches in the past three years.

Let's explore some of the most spine-tingling breaches of 2024 and uncover how they could have been avoided.

Major Data Breaches That Shook the Digital World

The Dark Secrets of National Public Data

The latest National Public Data breach is staggering, just this summer, a hacking group claims to have stolen 2.7 billion personal records, potentially affecting nearly everyone in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This includes American Social Security numbers. They published portions of the stolen data on the dark web, and while experts are still analyzing how accurate and complete the information is (there are only about half a billion people between the US, Canada, and UK), it's likely that most, if not all, social security numbers have been compromised.

The Haunting of AT&T

AT&T faced a nightmare when hackers breached their systems, exposing the personal data of 7.6 million current and 65.4 million former customers. The stolen data, including sensitive information like Social Security numbers and account details, surfaced on the dark web in March 2024.

Change Healthcare Faces a Chilling Breach

In February 2024, Change Healthcare fell victim to a massive ransomware attack that exposed the personal information of millions of individuals, with 145 million records exposed. This breach, one of the largest in healthcare history, compromised names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical records, and other sensitive data. The incident had far-reaching effects on patients, healthcare providers, and insurance companies, prompting many in the healthcare industry to reevaluate their security strategies.

The Nightmare of Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster faced a horror of epic proportions when hackers breached their systems, compromising 560 million customer records. This data breach included sensitive details such as payment information, order history, and personal identifiers. The leaked data, offered for sale online, put millions at risk and led to potential federal legal action against their parent company, Live Nation.

How Can Organizations Prevent Data Breaches: Proactive Steps

To mitigate the risk of data breaches, organizations should take proactive steps. 

  • Regularly monitor accounts and credit reports for unusual activity.
  • Strengthen access controls by minimizing over-privileged users.
  • Review permissions and encrypt critical data to protect it both at rest and in transit. 
  • Invest in real-time threat detection tools and conduct regular security audits to help identify vulnerabilities and respond quickly to emerging threats.
  • Implement Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) to detect shadow data and ensure proper data hygiene (i.e. encryption, masking, activity logging, etc.) 

These measures, including multi-factor authentication and routine compliance audits, can significantly reduce the risk of breaches and better protect sensitive information.

Best Practices to Secure Your Data 

Enough of the scary news, how do we avoid these nightmares?

Organizations can defend themselves starting with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) tools. By finding and eliminating shadow data, identifying over-privileged users, and monitoring data movement, companies can significantly reduce their risk of facing these digital threats.

Looking at these major breaches, it's clear the stakes have never been higher. Each incident highlights the vulnerabilities we face and the urgent need for strong protection strategies. Learning from these missteps underscores the importance of prioritizing data security.

As technology continues to evolve and regulations grow stricter, it’s vital for businesses to adopt a proactive approach to safeguarding their data. Implementing proper data security measures can play a critical role in protecting sensitive information and minimizing the risk of future breaches.

Sentra: The Data Security Platform for the AI era

Sentra enables security teams to gain full visibility and control of data, as well as protect against sensitive data breaches across the entire public cloud stack. By discovering where all the sensitive data is, how it's secured, and where it's going, Sentra reduces the 'data attack surface', the sum of all places where sensitive or critical data is stored or traveling to.Sentra’s cloud-native design combines powerful Data Discovery and Classification, DSPM, DAG, and DDR capabilities into a complete Data Security Platform (DSP). With this, Sentra customers achieve enterprise-scale data protection and answer the important questions about their data. Sentra DSP provides a crucial layer of protection distinct from other infrastructure-dependent layers. It allows organizations to scale data protection across multi-clouds to meet enterprise demands and keep pace with ever-evolving business needs. And it does so very efficiently - without creating undue burdens on the personnel who must manage it.

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Meni Besso
Meni Besso
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The Need for Continuous Compliance

The Need for Continuous Compliance

As compliance breaches rise and hefty fines follow, establishing and maintaining strict compliance has become a top priority for enterprises. However, compliance isn't a one-time or  even periodic task or something you can set and forget. To stay ahead, organizations are embracing continuous compliance - a proactive, ongoing strategy to meet regulatory requirements and uphold security standards.

Let’s explore what continuous compliance is, the advantages it offers, some challenges it may present, and how Sentra can help organizations achieve and sustain it.

What is Continuous Compliance?

Continuous compliance is the ongoing process of monitoring a company’s security practices and applying appropriate controls to ensure they consistently meet regulatory standards and industry best practices. Instead of treating compliance as a one-time task, it involves real-time monitoring to catch and address non-compliance issues as they happen. It also includes maintaining a complete inventory of where your data is at all times, what risks and security posture is associated, and who has access to it. This proactive approach ensures you are always ‘audit ready’ and helps avoid last-minute fixes before audits or cyber attacks, ensuring continuous security across the organization.

Why Do Companies Need Continuous Compliance?

Continuous compliance is essential for companies to ensure they are always aligned with industry regulations and standards, reducing the risk of violations and penalties. 

Here are a few key reasons why it's crucial:

  1. Regulatory Changes: Compliance standards frequently evolve. Continuous monitoring ensures companies can adapt quickly to new regulations without major disruptions.
  2. Avoiding Fines and Penalties: Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines, legal actions, or even loss of licenses. Staying compliant helps avoid these risks.
  3. Protecting Reputation: Data breaches, especially in industries dealing with sensitive data, can damage a company’s reputation. Continuous compliance helps protect established trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders.
  4. Reducing Security Risks: Many compliance frameworks are designed to enhance data security. Continuous compliance ensures that a company’s security posture is always up-to-date, reducing the risk of data breaches.
  5. Operational Efficiency: Automated, continuous compliance monitoring can streamline processes, reducing manual audits and interventions, saving time and resources.

For modern businesses, especially those managing sensitive data in the cloud, a continuous compliance strategy is critical to maintaining a secure, efficient, and trusted operation.

Cost Considerations for Compliance Investments

Investing in continuous compliance can lead to significant long-term savings. By maintaining consistent compliance practices, organizations can avoid the hefty fines associated with non-compliance, minimize resource surges during audits, and reduce the impacts of breaches through early detection. Continuous compliance provides security and financial predictability, often resulting in more manageable and predictable expenses.

In contrast, periodic compliance can lead to fluctuating costs. While expenses may be lower between audits, costs typically spike as audit dates approach. These spikes often result from hiring consultants, deploying temporary tools, or incurring overtime charges. Moreover, gaps between audits increase the risk of undetected non-compliance or security breaches, potentially leading to significant unplanned expenses from fines or mitigation efforts.

When evaluating cost implications, it's crucial to look beyond immediate expenses and consider the long-term financial impact. Continuous compliance not only offers a steadier expenditure pattern but also potential savings through proactive measures. On the other hand, periodic compliance can introduce cost variability and financial uncertainties associated with risk management.

Challenges of Continuous Compliance

  1. Keeping Pace with Technological Advancements
    The fast-evolving tech landscape makes compliance a moving target. Organizations need to regularly update their systems to stay in line with new technology, ensuring compliance procedures remain effective. This requires investment in infrastructure that can adapt quickly to these changes. Additionally, keeping up with emerging security risks requires continuous threat detection and response strategies, focusing on real-time monitoring and adaptive security standards to safeguard against new threats.
  2. Data Privacy and Protection Across Borders
    Global organizations face the challenge of navigating multiple, often conflicting, data protection regulations. To maintain compliance, they must implement unified strategies that respect regional differences while adhering to international standards. This includes consistent data sensitivity tagging and secure data storage, transfer, and processing, with measures like encryption and access controls to protect sensitive information.
  3. Internal Resistance and Cultural Shifts
    Implementing continuous compliance often meets internal resistance, requiring effective change management, communication, and education. Building a compliance-oriented culture, where it’s seen as a core value rather than a box-ticking exercise, is crucial.

Organizations must be adaptable, invest in the right technology, and create a culture that embraces compliance. This both helps meet regulatory demands and also strengthens risk management and security resilience.

How You Can Achieve Continuous Compliance With Sentra

First, Sentra automates data discovery and classification and takes a fraction of the time and effort it would take to manually catalog all sensitive data. It’s far more accurate, especially when using a solution that leverages LLMs to classify data with more granularity and rich context.  It’s also more responsive to the frequent changes in your modern data landscape.

Sentra also can automate the process of identifying regulatory violations and ensuring adherence to compliance requirements using pre-built policies that update and evolve with compliance changes (including policies that map to common compliance frameworks). It ensures that sensitive data stays within the correct environments and doesn’t travel to regions in violation of retention policies or without data encryption.

In contrast, manually tracking data inventory is inefficient, difficult to scale, and prone to errors and inaccuracies. This often results in delayed detection of risks, which can require significant time and effort to resolve as compliance audits approach.

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Karin Zano
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5 Cybersecurity Tips for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

5 Cybersecurity Tips for Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Secure our World: Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2024

As we kick off October's Cybersecurity Awareness Month and think about this year’s theme, “Secure Our World,” it’s important to remember that safeguarding our digital lives doesn't have to be complex. Simple, proactive steps can make a world of difference in protecting yourself and your business from online threats. In many cases, these simple steps relate to data — the sensitive information about users’ personal and professional lives. As a business, you are largely responsible for keeping your customers' and employees’ data safe. Starting with cybersecurity is the best way to ensure that this valuable information stays secure, no matter where it’s stored or how you use it.

Keeping Personal Identifiable Information (PII) Safe

Data security threats are more pervasive than ever today, with cybercriminals constantly evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities. From phishing attacks to ransomware, the risks are not just technical but also deeply personal — especially when it comes to protecting Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a perfect time to reflect on the importance of strong data security. Businesses, in particular, can contribute to a safer digital environment through Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). DSPM helps businesses - big and small alike -  monitor, assess, and improve their security posture, ensuring that sensitive data, such as PII, remains protected against breaches. By implementing DSPM, businesses can identify weak spots in their data security and take action before an incident occurs, reinforcing the idea that securing our world starts with securing our data.

Let's take this month as an opportunity to Secure Our World by embracing these simple but powerful DSPM measures to protect what matters most: data.

5 Cybersecurity Tips for Businesses

  1. Discover and Classify Your Data: Understand where all of your data resides, how it’s used, and its levels of sensitivity and protection. By leveraging discovery and classification, you can maintain complete visibility and control over your business’s data, reducing the risks associated with shadow data (unmanaged or abandoned data).
  2. Ensure data always has a good risk posture: Maintain a strong security stance by ensuring your data always has a good posture through Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). DSPM continuously monitors and strengthens your data’s security posture (readiness to tackle potential cybersecurity threats), helping to prevent breaches and protect sensitive information from evolving threats.
  3. Protect Private and Sensitive Data: Keep your private and sensitive data secure, even from internal users. By implementing Data Access Governance (DAG) and utilizing techniques like data de-identification and masking, you can protect critical information and minimize the risk of unauthorized access.
  4. Embrace Least-Privilege Control: Control data access through the principle of least privilege — only granting access to the users and systems who need it to perform their jobs. By implementing Data Access Governance (DAG), you can limit access to only what is necessary, reducing the potential for misuse and enhancing overall data security.
  5. Continual Threat Monitoring for Data Protection: To protect your data in real-time, implement continual monitoring of new threats. With Data Detection and Response (DDR), you can stay ahead of emerging risks, quickly identifying and neutralizing potential vulnerabilities to safeguard your sensitive information.

How Sentra Helps Secure Your Business’s World

Today, a business's “world” is extremely complex and ever-changing. Users can easily move, change, or copy data and connect new applications/environments to your ecosystem. These factors make it challenging to pinpoint where your data resides and who has access to it at any given moment. 

Sentra helps by giving businesses a vantage point of their entire data estate, including multi-cloud and on-premises environments. We combine all of the above practices—granular discovery and classification, end-to-end data security posture management, data access governance, and continuous data detection and response into a single platform. To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Day, check out how our data security platform can help improve your security posture.

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