The biggest and constant fear for large organizations is data breach. As perpetrators are invisible, anonymous, and appearing omnipresent, this fear is understandable and justified. In the review article “Enterprise data breach: causes, challenges, prevention, and future directions” recently published in WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Long Cheng, Fang Liu, and Daphne Yao break down this exceedingly complex data leak problem and give insights into the enterprise cyber ecosystem. It will help managers, administrators, cybersecurity practitioners, and researchers to understand the data-leak threats that enterprises face. This article explains deployable techniques and cutting edge solutions for reducing the risk of data leak with real-world examples and statistics to benefit readers at all technical levels.

Besides the commonly reported data exfiltration, this article also discusses the serious data-leak threats posed by mistakes made by employees (i.e., inadvertent data leak), as well as by malicious insiders (e.g., cyber and business espionage). The article shows how the prevalent content- or context- based detection approaches fit into the larger enterprise security ecosystem. The impact of big data on scalability, data leak detection as a cloud security service, deep learning for reducing false alarms in the prickly insider-threat detection are exciting topics that the authors point out as promising future research directions.

Text kindly contributed by the authors.