How Cyera Protects Intellectual Property

Intellectual property occupies an increasingly central position in the US and global economies. According to a 2022 report from the US Patent and Trademark Office, IP-intensive industries across a range of economic sectors accounted for $7.8 trillion dollars of America’s GDP, and more than 40 percent of American jobs. And according to strategy consulting firm Deloitte, IP assets can make up to 80 percent of some companies’ value.

For that very reason, IP has become a more enticing target for malicious actors, with IP theft from cybercrime and corporate espionage taking a greater toll on American businesses. According to Boston-based cybersecurity firm Cybereason, just one Chinese-backed threat actor - Winnti APT - has been able to siphon off trillions of dollars in IP assets from 30 multinational companies over the last fifteen years.

And the problem is only going to get worse. The widespread adoption of cloud computing and the absolute explosion of data across platforms and services has made it harder and harder for businesses to even know what data they have and where it lives, to say nothing of protecting that data from external actors or insider threats.

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From the Cybersecurity Insiders 2024 DSPM Adoption Report

The response to these trends has been to adopt network and device hardening techniques, including Data Loss Prevention tools designed to prevent valuable data from escaping the network perimeter. But successful DLP implementation assumes the business has already made a complete and accurate discovery and classification of its data assets. Otherwise, DLP rules won’t “fit” the organization’s needs, with the result that SOC teams are either inundated with false positive alerts, or dial back alert thresholds and fail to stop the egress or exfiltration of valuable data.

That’s where Cyera comes in. Cyera is a unified, AI-native data security platform with the ability to discover and classify businesses’ data with greater speed and precision than any other tool on the market. Cyera’s advantage lies in its AI-native design, which allows it to go beyond merely recognizing data types, to actually understanding what the data are and why they're important. This means that Cyera can classify unstructured data with far greater accuracy, learn classification schemas specifically tailored to its customers’ environments, and put these insights together to make much more precise file-level classification decisions. 

Let’s break that down, starting with the problem of unstructured data. Structured data conform to a pre-determined format (think spreadsheets with customer names, credit cards, and order histories) and are typically stored in a relational database, making them easily searchable. On the other hand, unstructured data don’t adhere to a consistent format. Even worse, they constitute a large and growing majority of all the data that have been created over the last few years. Engineering specifications for new car model, a hand-written cookie recipe, and even AI-generated notes from a writers’ room meeting are all examples of unstructured data types that have proliferated as IP-intensive industries and AI-powered tools have grown in importance.

The nature of unstructured data makes them difficult to search for and accurately tag. As a result, many businesses simply fail to locate unstructured data that may contain IP. These data contribute to the growing size of the organization’s attack surface, but lie outside the protective embrace of DLP policies. But with Cyera in place, correctly identifying and classifying unstructured data is easy. 

One large biotech company expressed skepticism that any tool could possibly learn, not just to recognize diagrams of molecular compounds developed by their R&D teams, but to actually distinguish proprietary molecules from those in the public domain, and understand what makes them sensitive - an essential capability to prevent a flood of false positive alerts. Cyera accepted the challenge, and now that company is a customer, trusting Cyera to help them protect their investments as they work to bring those ideas to market.

One of the key differentiators that allows Cyera to classify unstructured data more precisely than its competitors is its ability to teach itself classification schemas that are unique to the customer. Every company has standard operating procedures, business rules, and even jargon that make up part of what we mean by the company’s “culture.” Often these features are the result of operating within a given sector and being subject to specific regulatory frameworks, but they’re also at least partly idiosyncratic to each organization. And Cyera’s AI-Native classification engine can learn them. We’re finding that about 40 percent of the sensitive data Cyera identifies and classifies belongs to one of these advanced classification schemas. 

Thanks to Cyera’s ability to scan and classify data regardless of whether it’s structured or unstructured, and apply categories specific to each customer’s operating environment, Cyera is able to realize far more precise file-level classification of customer data. For example, while on a phone call with a health care executive, Cyera CSO Jason Clark asked him to scribble down some notes about a hypothetical “M&A” strategy. The one page document referenced goals like protecting IP and potential targets for acquisition, but didn’t say it was “confidential.” Jason asked his friend to photograph the note and email it to him.

The company’s DLP failed to catch it, but Cyera immediately recognized and classified the document as a mergers and acquisitions strategy by a health care executive. It labeled the document highly confidential. With Cyera in place, this document would have been visible and secure. 

Examples like this are potentially legion. By the end of this year the world will have created as many bytes of data as there are stars in the universe. Most of that data will be unstructured, and much of that will consist of potentially valuable intellectual property. But you can’t protect what you can’t see. Without Cyera, companies that depend on their IP are flying blind. But with Cyera, the full scope and contours of the attack surface become apparent. Armed with that knowledge, businesses can minimize their risk of a breach while optimizing the resources devoted to protecting their crown jewels.

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