When sensitive information congregates in a certain region, it unnecessarily elevates your data risk profile, leading to what are known as “toxic combinations.” For instance, co-locating names, addresses, and credit card numbers in the same Google Doc files or a table is highly harmful. You must give this serious data security issue your undivided attention and top priority. 

It is not unusual for different kinds of sensitive data to coexist in the same data source or data collection. Toxic combinations are becoming more common, as evidenced by some of the biggest breaches in recent years. 

What Makes Toxic Data Combinations Such a Serious Deal?

Three primary methods through which toxic pairings of sensitive data pose significant dangers to businesses are: 

Unintentionally Assisting Insider Threats 

In the past few years, organizations have witnessed a steady increase in insider attacks. Combining several forms of sensitive data worsens the issue by increasing organizational risk and making it easier for insiders to obtain important information. For instance, insiders have unfettered access to one type of sensitive data, such as names, they may also access associated data, like addresses or Social Security numbers, all contained in the same data source, batch, or file. 

This inadvertently helps internal adversaries carry out their planned lateral movement and breach techniques, which accelerates their harmful actions—especially in the era of remote labor. 

Unintentionally Exacerbating the Impact of a Data Compromise

Furthermore, they can significantly amplify the risk of data breaches. When highly sensitive data is stored in the same place, a breach of this combined information can have far-reaching consequences. It not only provides cyber criminals with a more detailed understanding of an individual, but it also increases the potential damage that can occur from a single breach. The combined effects of these breaches can lead to significant financial losses, legal consequences, and regulatory penalties, ultimately damaging the organization’s profitability and overall operational resilience. 

Intensifying Privacy concerns 

When harmful combinations come together, they may lead to privacy violations that endanger both individuals and organizations. When several pieces of personal data merge, they create sensitive data that can disclose much more personal information than individuals originally intended to keep private. In addition to hurting partners, clients, and consumers, this erosion of privacy trust seriously damages an organization’s credibility and reputation. 

Employ Automated Methods to Identify Risky Data Associations

Know Your Data 

Complete data visibility, context, and control are necessary for a robust data security strategy in the era of hybrid and multi-cloud computing. 

Researchers should be able to discover sensitive material, particularly harmful combinations of it, across all forms of data, including structured and unstructured data stored on-premises and in the cloud.  

Toxic combinations of data can be identified and located more precisely by utilizing sophisticated AI and ML techniques, which go beyond simple and conventional pattern-matching methods. We have hundreds of OOB classifiers and trainable classifiers that can discover sensitive data, such as SSNs, payment-related data, healthcare records, PII, and many other sorts of PI. 

Locate Toxic Combinations

Create and set up distinctive composite identifiers that represent the poisonous mixtures you want to highlight and consider extremely dangerous. For example, you can configure a composite identifier ruleset to identify combinations of personal data, such as addresses, account numbers, and names. Users might view this combination as a serious risk for exposure, access, and misuse, which could impact the person’s privacy and security. 

You can put together sensitive data fragments to highlight important data hazards, much like an experienced investigator puts together the pieces to solve a challenging case. Organizations may improve their data protection plans and proactively manage risks by having a thorough grasp of data interdependencies. 

Conclusion

Recognizing your harmful combos is one thing; taking action against them is quite another. You may expedite and simplify the process of identifying, prioritizing, and addressing your most pressing data threats. Create policies in the security posture management console to identify particular harmful combinations and present them as urgent notifications. Investigate thoroughly; after that, automatically initiate remediation workflows and activities involving the appropriate parties and equipment, including masking, deletion, encryption, and more. Carry out with confidence remediation action validation and risk reduction. 

Proactively locate, evaluate, and eliminate harmful combinations while maintaining the privacy and security of sensitive data. This capability becomes a vital tool for enterprises trying to uphold data integrity, compliance, and trust in an increasingly linked data ecosystem.  

Read Whitepaper Toxic Data: Hidden Threat to Your Organization’s Performance