Page 138 - Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2024

• Using role-based access controls (RBAC) to define user roles, for people and non-human
identities alike, to manage permissions for reading, writing, and modifying data — with the context
of the data being accessed.
• Identifying and eliminating stale data. Security teams must ensure that they know about all the
data in the corporate environment. Often, stale data or “ghost” data exists that has been forgotten
or lost, increasing the risk surface but providing no benefit to the organization. By finding and
removing this information, organizations can reduce the overall risk surface without negatively
impacting business outcomes.
• Hardening data is important, but only possible by identifying all sensitive data in order to encrypt,
tokenize, mask, and anonymize data. This makes the data much harder for adversaries to use if
they do manage to gain access.
• Classifying and mapping data comprehensively and continuously enables security teams to
quickly identify the location, type, and business context of data if a breach occurs, thus making it
easier to respond quickly and mitigate the impact of a breach.
• Identifying and protecting intellectual property. Many organizations don’t realize that there
are categories of data that are part of their core IP. This may be information related to buyer
technology, investment strategies, or something else. Regardless, this IP is important to the
business and must be identified and protected, whether from a malicious attacker or inadvertent
ingestion by an artificial intelligence model or chatbot.

Minimize Overall Risk with Trust Boundaries

Modern organizations must manage and secure vast and growing amounts of data across diverse
environments without unnecessarily limiting how the business can use the data. To protect data
effectively, organizations need automatic and adaptable controls, such as trust boundaries. A trust
boundary is the concept of establishing logical frameworks for grouping and managing data or systems
access and control based on the sensitivity or classification level of that data to manage risk. While
security teams can control access so that only those with a legitimate need have access to sensitive
data, the volume of data today makes it all but impossible to manage without the automation and
intelligent adjustments based on data context and needs that a trust boundary can provide. Static rules
and human intervention simply cannot keep up with the scale and speed at which modern enterprises
use data.

The Ticketmaster breach is far from unique. Indeed, it’s estimated that about 165 of Snowflake’s customer
accounts were affected in the recent hacking campaign targeting Snowflake’s customers. This should
serve as a wake-up call for organizations worldwide: it’s time to prioritize data security. This is not the
responsibility of the data warehouse or technology vendor, but of each organization to ensure that the
right people have the right access to the right data at the right time.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2024 Edition 138
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