Cybersecurity is an essential investment to protect personal data and comply with the GDPR.
The vast majority of GDPR requirements center around data management, namely data collecting and processing. There are obligations to provide notice when collecting personal data, prohibitions on unauthorized data processing, requirements to keep records of data processing, a duty to appoint a data protection officer in certain instances, and rules regarding transfer of personal data to third parties and third countries, amongst others.
But this should not overshadow the fact that data security is also a pillar of GDPR. GDPR has specific security-related language, as described in detail below. Further, a key component of protecting personal data is keeping it secure – both from exfiltration by cyber adversaries and from internal leakage. Thus, as they pre- pare for the GDPR, it is imperative that organisations’ investments in compliance activities and information management processes and technologies be complemented with appropriate investments in cybersecurity.
Summary of relevant provisions from the GDPR (see this link to the GDPR for full text) :
Summary of provisions
|Security of data processing
Organisations must implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk. Those measures must account for the state of the art. [Article 32]
Personal data should be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security and confidentiality of the data, including for preventing unauthorized access to or use of personal data and the equipment used for the processing. [Recital, paragraph 39]
In assessing data security risk, consideration should be given to risks presented
Data breach notification
Supervisory authorities must be notified if personal data is lost, stolen or other- wise compromised, unless the breach is unlikely to result in a relevant risk to the individual. Notification must happen without undue delay and, where feasible, not later than 72 hours after having become aware of the breach. In certain cases, indi- viduals must be notified. Notifications must describe a range of information about the breach, such as its nature, categories and number of personal data records concerned, likely consequences, measures taken to address the breach and mitigate its effects, and other items. [Articles 33 and 34]
Supervisory authorities are to impose administrative fines for GDPR infringements, on a case-by-case basis. When deciding whether to impose a fine and the amount, the authorities are directed to consider many factors, including the degree of responsibility in implementing technical and organisational measures, taking into account the state of the art as per Article 32. [Article 83]
Palo Alto Networks® can help with organisations’ security and data protection efforts related to GDPR compliance by assisting in:
1. Securing personal data. The GDPR requires security of data processing, accounting for the state of the art. Our Next-Generation Security Platform provides just that: security at the application, network and endpoint level, as well as in the
2. Data breach prevention. Prevention of data breaches, whether a result of hacking or accidental leakage, is crucial for compliance with the GDPR. Proper cybersecurity is essential to ensure your organisation’s personal and busi- ness-critical data and applications remain protected. Our Next-Generation Security Platform is built for prevent
3. Data breach notification. In the unfortunate instance of a data breach, it must be reported. Our Next-Generation Security Platform can help determine what personal data was compromised, and contribute key facts about measures taken to address the breach.
Many parts of our product portfolio have capabilities and features that meet these needs. These are described herein.
Securing Personal Data
The GDPR requires security of data processing, accounting for the state of the art. Palo Alto Networks platform secures data at the application, network and endpoint level, as well as in the cloud.
Truly reducing cyber risk and protecting data, including personal data, requires integrated, automated and effective controls in place to detect and prevent known and unknown threats at every stage of the attack lifecycle. Built from the ground up for prevention, the
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform allows organisations to confidently pursue a digital-first strategy as they implement key technology initiatives within the cloud and, increasingly, mobile networks to protect their most valued data assets from exfiltration by cybercriminals and accidental data leakage.
The Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform combines network and endpoint security with threat intelligence to provide automated protection and prevent cyberattacks – not just detect them. Our platform natively brings together all key security functions – including firewall, URL filtering, IDS/IPS, and advanced endpoint and threat protection. Because these functions are purposefully built into the plat- form with cyberthreat prevention in mind, and natively share essential information across the respective disciplines, our platform ensures better security than legacy firewalls and antivirus, UTMs, or point threat detection products. In short, better security supports better data protection.
The GDPR calls for technical and organisational security measures that account for the state of the art. Legacy security systems, made up of cobbled-together point products, have proven inadequate to pre- vent the rising volume, automation and sophistication of cyberattacks. CISOs should review these legacy products carefully to determine if they meet the state of the art.
The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and as such, state of the art technology must evolve to prevent new threats. The Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform combines network and endpoint security with threat intelligence to provide automated protection and prevent cyberattacks, not just detect them. Contrary to legacy point products, our platform leverages the network effects of thousands of cus- tomers, technology partners and researchers sharing threat information. We build technology that prevents attacks at the key tactical and strategic places where cyberattackers need to take action to be successful, and we update our global customer base with the latest protections in as few as five minutes. As a matter of scope, we generate more than one million new preventive measures each week as we identify new, or ‘zero-day’, cyberthreats. With our platform, organisations can safely enable the use of all applications crit- ical to running their business, confidently pursue new technology initiatives, and protect the organisation from both basic and complicated, multifaceted cyberattacks. For CISOs who want to say they have account- ed for the state of the art, Palo Alto Networks should be among the security elements considered.
Prevention of data breaches, whether a result of hacking or accidental leakage, is crucial for compliance with the GDPR. Proper cybersecurity is essential to ensure your organisation’s personal and business-critical data and applications remain protected.
Our platform enables four key prevention techniques relevant to data security, simultaneously contributing to GDPR compliance.
To further alleviate data transfer and privacy concerns, WildFire EU, a localised cloud deployment, is available to analyse data without ever transferring it from regional boundaries.
These prevention techniques are powered by WildFire, the industry’s most advanced analysis and prevention engine for highly evasive zero-day malware and exploits. The cloud-based service employs a multi-technique approach that combines dynamic and static analysis, innovative machine learning techniques and a groundbreaking bare metal analysis environment to detect and prevent even the most evasive threats. WildFire goes beyond legacy approaches used to detect unknown threats, bringing together the benefits of four independent techniques for high-fidelity and evasion-resistant discovery:
Together, these techniques allow WildFire to discover and prevent unknown malware and exploits with high efficacy and near-zero false positives.
The GDPR applies to any organisation that processes personal data on EU residents, regardless of where the organisation is physically located. For many large or multinational organisations, personal data processing might take place in multiple locations, all of which must be compliant. Panorama™ network security man- agement empowers organisations with easy-to-implement, consolidated policy creation and management of our next-generation firewalls. With Panorama, you can implement both centralised and regional policy, and easily delegate to regional admins as needed or preferred. The key is the flexibility to implement policies according to business needs and specific regional laws. For example, a Panorama admin can enforce security policies for firewalls located in a branch in Singapore or Brazil, even though the regional admins in those locations may be unaware of a compliance need to protect data subject to the GDPR.
Data breaches can result from data exfiltration or leakage, and our platform can contribute to preventing both.
With our Next-Generation Security Platform, each critical stage within the attack lifecycle is met with a defence model to prevent data exfiltration – from the attacker’s initial attempt to breach the perimeter, to delivering malware or exploiting the endpoint, to moving laterally through the network until the attacker reaches the primary target and attempts to exfiltrate personal and sensitive data.
To maintain compliance with GDPR, it’s critically important to prevent accidental data leakage/sharing by your internal and partner communities of users across the entire infrastructure. End users are amongst the most common risks, particularly when using SaaS applications. Often untrained and unaware of the risks they bring, their actions can result in accidental personal data leakage. Our security platform prevents data exfiltration and leakage in several ways:
◦ These capabilities are delivered through our platform using the next-generation firewall (e.g. User-ID™, App-ID™ and Content-ID™ technologies) and Aperture™ SaaS security service. The next-generation firewall analyses all traffic from your network to SaaS applications and back. However, certain cloud- based activity can be invisible to in-line security services, such as data sharing permissions or accessing cloud-based data from outside the network (without VPN). In this case, Aperture complements the next-generation firewall, using SaaS APIs to connect directly to the SaaS applications themselves. This makes it possible to see everything users have uploaded or shared. With Aperture, users can view and monitor file uploads across all assets in enterprise SaaS applications, such as Box, Microsoft® Office, Dropbox®, Salesforce®, Secure Data Space and more. Policies can then be applied to monitor and enforce responsible use of assets (including personal data) and protect against accidental data leaks caused by human errors, such as promiscuous or inadvertent sharing, and sharing content using links that may be exposed to the internet. If a policy violation is detected, an alert is generated. If configured, Aperture takes automatic action to remediate the risk.
◦ Our platform provides the capabilities to break up credential-based attacks across the attack lifecycle.
Often, attackers will use credential phishing attempts, sent via email or social media, to trick users into submitting corporate credentials in a fraudulent form. Our platform stops credential leakage by preventing users from submitting credentials to unknown and unauthorised sites. Because stolen credentials are typically used to access critical systems inside the organisation, we also establish protections against lateral movement by enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies that govern access to these critical applications where sensitive data is contained.
In addition, AutoFocus™, our contextual threat intelligence service, can ingest third-party threat intelligence sources and turn them into prevention across our security platform through our MineMeld™ application. Once indicators of compromise are collected, MineMeld can filter, de-duplicate and consolidate metadata across all sources, allowing security teams to analyse a more actionable set of data, enriched from multiple sources, for easier enforcement.
In the unfortunate instance of a data breach, it must be reported.
In the unfortunate event of a personal data breach, the GDPR requires notification to supervisory authorities, unless the event is unlikely to result in risk to individuals’ rights or freedom. Notification must include a range of information, including what data was impacted and what measures were taken.
Our platform can help maintain compliance with this GDPR requirement in the event of a breach. For example, AutoFocus provides the analytics details needed for remediation, helping to understand who the user was, what the threat was, the impact and the level of risk. All of this can help with notification requirements.
In addition, the next-generation firewall can be used to educate users via custom notification pages. System administrators can add their desired education message to the notification pages so that whenever an accidental data leak is prevented, the end user is served that message. For example, the message can include
a link to the corporate data policies and best practices. This helps with overall prevention, as well as education efforts that support notification.