Detect and Protect Sensitive Data in Email

Material Security transforms email from your organization's most vulnerable data repository into a protected, secure archive without overly-restrictive retention policies. The platform continuously discovers sensitive data across all mailboxes—going back to day zero—and protects it with a zero-trust layer of security, ensuring your most critical information remains safe even in the event of an account takeover.

Problem: Data in inboxes is a vulnerable target for attackers

For most organizations, the email archive is a black box and a massive liability. Decades of conversations, contracts, credentials, and regulated data sit unprotected in user mailboxes, creating a treasure trove for any attacker who successfully compromises an account.

This creates several fundamental security challenges:

• You can't protect what you can't see: Security teams have almost no visibility into the sensitive data accumulating in individual mailboxes across the company. They can’t answer a simple question like, "How many Social Security Numbers are sitting in our email archive, and who has access to them?"
• An account takeover means a total data breach: The first thing an attacker does after compromising an account is search the mailbox. They look for passwords, financial data, customer lists, and internal secrets. Because a logged-in session is implicitly trusted, a single breached account gives an attacker immediate access to everything.
• Traditional security falls short: Legacy Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools are primarily focused on preventing data from leaving the network. They do little to protect the vast amount of data at rest from an attacker who is already inside your environment.
• A growing, unregulated risk: Every day, your organization's email archive grows, increasing the amount of sensitive data at risk. This unprotected data represents a significant, unmanaged compliance and reputational risk just waiting to be exposed.

Solution: Protect inboxes with step-up authentication

Material Security applies a pragmatic, zero-trust approach to your data, regardless of where it lives. The platform identifies your most sensitive information inside mailboxes and applies a powerful layer of protection that neutralizes the primary threat of an account takeover.

• Gain complete visibility into your greatest data risk: Material continuously and non-disruptively scans the full contents of every mailbox in your environment—from day one to today. Our platform automatically classifies sensitive information, giving you a clear and actionable picture of what's at risk, from PII and financial data to internal credentials.
• Proactively protect sensitive data before a breach occurs: Finding data isn't enough. For sensitive emails and attachments, Material can automatically apply a protective layer that requires a step-up MFA challenge to view. The original content is replaced with a simple placeholder, rendering it useless to an attacker until a real-time authentication prompt is satisfied.
• Neutralize the threat of account takeovers: With Material's protection in place, a compromised account is effectively contained. The attacker can log in, but they can't access anything of value. Every attempt to view a sensitive email or attachment hits a dead end at an MFA prompt they cannot pass. The blast radius is eliminated.
• Implement robust security without disrupting workflows: This protection is applied intelligently, often focusing on older, more sensitive data to ensure a frictionless experience for employees. Legitimate users can easily access what they need with a quick authentication step, while attackers are stopped cold.

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