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Considering all the confidential data we come across during our testing and customer scans, it’s amazing to me how many “confidential” documents are posted that aren’t really confidential. This is extremely common with PowerPoint’s, where, in many cases, the slide deck was made available to the audience after the presentation. Sounds common, doesn’t it?So why is this happening? Is it because companies have no policies in place (unlikely)? Is it because companies struggle with enforcing policies (more likely)?More importantly, does this even have an impact on the owner? After all, it IS content that was approved for public consumption. Right?

WRONG! Think about the implications of labeling everything confidential:

• The eventual desensitization to confidential data in general. This leads to a greater risk of exposure through negligence – either on behalf of the owner or especially the recipient.
• Incapability to classify important data. This incurs increased inefficiencies through manual sorting processes.
• Waste of internal resources. Because you’re constantly spending time cleaning up what could have been prevented in the first place – sensitive data or not.

But this isn’t really an easy problem to solve, primarily, because human error is such a big decisive factor for this. People are rushed to do their jobs and rules tend to “get in the way” of doing business faster. Or perhaps they weren’t properly educated on process. In any event a difficult matter at best. Now if we had total control of our data – all the time – this would probably not be such a concern. But until then, we’ll have to spend our time cleaning up after the rule-breakers.

Categoried under:  Data Leak Detection, Data Leak Trends, Data Security Policy