In 2018, the world’s trust was shaken. That year, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had furtively harvested data left exposed by Facebook. The information of over 87 million individuals was exploited to assemble voter profiles and customise the distribution of political advertisements in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential Election as well as Brexit.

When a network contains an excess of redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data, productivity and desired outcomes can take a hit. The good news is that organizations can significantly reduce the impact of ROT data when they plan properly and invest in the right tools.

Sebastian Neef (@gehaxelt) is a IT security freelancer and a top contributor from the Detectify Crowdsource community. In this guest blog, he looks at ways WordPress plugins leak sensitive data in the wild: The OWASP Top 10 puts Sensitive Data Exposure on the 3rd place of the most common web security issues. In this blog post we will have a look at sensitive data exposure that you might not be aware of.

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of processes and technologies that ensure sensitive data is not lost, misused or exposed to unauthorized users by end-users or misconfiguration. Most data loss prevention solutions rely on data classification. This means that sensitive data is grouped into different buckets, e.g. regulated, confidential, financial data, intellectual property, and business-critical data.

Having worked with many individuals responding to incidents where their digital private images were shared without consent, social media or email accounts had unauthorised access, and even physical safety was a concern, it is all too familiar how terrifying the unknown can be. As someone who has been on both the victim’s and later the responder’s side, I am qualified to express both the terror and knowledge of things you can do to take back control.