SAFE

PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) are increasingly vital in today’s digital landscape. PETs are essential for protecting individual rights, fostering trust, ensuring compliance, and supporting ethical practices in an increasingly interconnected world. Laws like GDPR, DORA and CCPA require companies to handle personal data responsibly. And PETs can help organizations comply with these regulations and avoid hefty fines. Besides being required by compliance, PETs also strengthen data protection and, in turn, bolster user trust. Paperclip SAFE aligns with the key tenets of PET, allowing for data to be encrypted during ingestion and keeping it encrypted during use and throughout the entirety of the data lifecycle. There are a number of different PET techniques that are effective.   1. Data Anonymization and Pseudonymization These techniques modify data to remove personally identifiable information (PII) while still allowing for analysis. Anonymization removes all identifiers, while pseudonymization replaces them with fictitious values. Both Privacy solutions […]

In a recent podcast episode from Digital Doorways, the featured guest Marene Allison advises CISOs everywhere to focus on a sustainable data-centric approach and recommends innovative encryption of data-in-use technology to address gaps within operational data security. Marene is a highly respected cybersecurity and Information Technology (IT) leader, advisor, and board member with more than three decades of experience, including as the former Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for Johnson & Johnson. She is featured on the podcast with host Jason Siegel, founder of the cybersecurity-focused digital marketing firm Bluetext. “Everyone needs to have a new primer on encryption and how it can be utilized,” Allison said in the episode. “It can be used at rest, in use, and in transit. You can encrypt all of that today.” Marene continues to discuss how data is rarely in one place—it is moving around and needs to be accessible. […]

The culture of cybersecurity and data protection is broken. Let’s look at it from a unique point of view. You’ve got an employee who is terrible at their job, consistently makes mistakes, and puts the company in harm’s way. Even worse, when you confront them about it, they make excuses, blame it on someone else, and really don’t care. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, this represents the posture of our cybersecurity community and our performance protecting data. Who really needs privacy in this digital age where we share every minute detail of our lives on social media anyway? While we’re walking down sarcastic lane, let’s look at encryption. Who needs it? Just implement better access controls and authentication, or better yet just plug in a better DLP product. Why would anyone bother encrypting their most valuable data—data in use? It’s not like there are hordes of cybercriminals just waiting to get their […]

On a typical day, cybersecurity solutions hum in the background, diligently protecting businesses from the myriad threats that seek to exploit vulnerabilities. But what happens when an entity you rely on for security faces its own significant outage? CrowdStrike’s service disruption halted air travel, impacted healthcare, and cripped businesses worldwide. And now that the issue has been largely resolved, this technology-related incident provides invaluable lessons for organizations and cybersecurity professionals alike. Here is what we learned from the CrowdStrike outage and how these lessons can bolster our approach to cybersecurity resilience. Redundancy Isn’t Just for Power Supplies The CrowdStrike outage highlighted the critical importance of having operational redundancy built into your cybersecurity strategy. While CrowdStrike is known for its robust security measures, no system is infallible. For organizations relying on a single cybersecurity vendor (or any vendor that controls critical systems), it’s vital to have a backup plan. This might […]

Since Paperclip introduced SAFE® in September 2022, we have been focused on educating the market on the solution and the critical security issues it can solve. We had to answer the question “What is searchable data encryption?” for people who have varying degrees of familiarity with encryption technology. Many organizations already had encryption in motion and at rest but did not know the significance of searchable encryption (often referred to as encryption of data in use). Searchable data encryption is the ability to search data while it remains fully encrypted. This differs from encryption at rest and in motion as those two solutions only encrypt the data while it is in a restful state and that data must be decrypted for search or use. Searchable encryption is a highly beneficial evolution to the way we currently secure data. It’s also the only solution aligned to the way we use data […]

Last week, IDC hosted its annual Directions event in Boston to share their latest research related to trends impacting the IT industry. The event theme “The Digital Business Impact of AI Everywhere” was focused on the future of AI, including key initiatives, barriers to success, and growing cybersecurity concerns. Here’s what we learned. 1. Data is king. Data is everywhere and dependence on it is growing. Our ability to process that data, securely, and in real time determines our ability to implement impactful AI initiatives. Prioritizing data protection while retaining sufficient usability is the new paradigm of enterprise cyber-defense. Board of Directors top priorities, according to a 2022 IDC survey1, is Data Sovereignty and Cybersecurity Threats. A 2024 IDC survey2 stated that 42% of surveyed companies said Security, Privacy and Trust of Data and AI Systems were the top AI Initiatives needing services expertise. This means that data security initiatives, […]

Data breaches have surged in frequency and cost—to the tune of $8 trillion dollars globally in 2023. And this isn’t just impacting the companies who are breached; these costs impact customer trust and contribute to global inflation. We are also seeing a massive shift in hardline accountability and precedence from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), The Office of the U.S. President, and other regulatory entities for organizations to do more to protect the data they use to run their operations. The impact of cyber-crime and poor cyber controls goes far beyond the cost associated with data loss and ransom attack. Added costs that highlight the greater impact include civil lawsuits, regulatory fines, loss of customers, higher interest rates (credit cards and lending practices), and even the possible arrest of cybersecurity leadership. In summary, the cost of cyber-crime doesn’t stop with cyber liability insurance claims or mitigation costs, they go […]

We know that encryption is the best way to secure data. No other technology does more to secure sensitive, controlled, and private data than encryption. And currently, the best encryption algorithm available is Advanced Encryption Standard 256 (AES-256). We also know that the world operates on data, and that data is primarily transacted within cyberspace. Over the last 30+ years, we have evolved from brick-and-mortar operations to cyber-operations. As a result of this evolution, we create, consume, and store more data than ever before. Unfortunately, despite these facts, encryption technologies are poorly adopted. Based on recent reports, 7,000,000 unencrypted data records are compromised globally, every day1. That’s no surprise given that only 60% of enterprises worldwide indicate that encryption was “extensively employed on company backups and archives2 and only 42% of respondents use encryption to secure their customer data3. So, why don’t we see greater adoption of encryption? After all, […]

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a foundation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has revolutionized computing as we know it and has become the hottest trend of 2023, rolling into 2024. It offers remarkable capabilities for data analysis, mining, utilization, and other data related computational tasks. However, this technology also harbors significant concern related to the potential for unintentional exposure of sensitive, controlled, and private data such as Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI). As a result, the importance of genAI security is expected to rise. LLMs, by their very nature, are trained on massive datasets of text and code, often sourced from databases (unstructured/structured), the internet, or open-access repositories. While these datasets provide a rich source of information for learning, they may also inadvertently contain sensitive PII and PHI, such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, financial information, and medical records. The viewer may […]

The following is a guest post from our partner, Securadin. Click here for the original post.   Today, more than ever IoT devices have become an integral part of our daily lives. They are connected to a vast network that allows us to control everything from our thermostats to our garage doors. More importantly, we rely on IoT devices to manage the security and efficiency of data centers, property management systems, and various other industrial or environmental facilities. However, plain text IoT devices can be notoriously vulnerable to external threats such as hacking and data breaches. This is precisely why it’s critical to implement encryption when it comes to these devices. When we talk about encryption, we mean the process of encoding data so that it is accessible only to authorized parties. Simply put, encryption works by transforming plaintext into ciphertext, rendering it inaccessible to anyone without the proper authorization. […]