Data leakage risk is a significant issue for consumers, companies and governments alike. According to the 2011 Global Cost of Data Breach Study1, costs of data breaches vary depending upon the type of data breach and the country's regulatory landscape, ranging from a high of $5.5 million in the U.S. to a low of $1.1 million in India, reaching $2,270,862 in Australia in 2011. Rapid technological changes and growing data volumes further complicate both internal and external exposure threats.

GE Capital is one of the largest lenders in Australia and New Zealand. It is part of the global GE business, a diversified technology and financial services company. The Information Security Team at GE Capital Australia and New Zealand receives a number of large weekly log files from the security software program implemented by GE Capital headquarters. The team, however, could only perform a limited review of the data with manual analysis techniques and spreadsheet software. So they installed the ACL data leakage detection solution.

Results
Using ACL Technology, GE Capital Australia and New Zealand:

• automated the security log analysis
• identified unauthorized activity
• improved detection capabilities.

GE Capital were also able to reduce the time and effort required considerably to analyse the large security logs. The analytics generates daily and weekly exception reports to identify potential unauthorized and unusual data copying activity for deeper investigation.

As well as improving data leakage detection capabilities, the depth and quality of the security log analysis project has impressed management and cut costs.
(1 2011 Global Cost of Data Breach Study, issued in March 2012 by Ponemon Institute and Symantec Data)

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How is your corporate treasury department detecting and controlling data leakage?