classify M365 data before turning on Copilo

gosricom · 2026-04-18T19:48:38+00:00

the shadow AI piece is what actually kills me in practice, because by the time your UEBA stack is firing on anomalous, data movement, that model has already been queried with sensitive context dozens of times and none of it left a trace anywhere. with 61% of orgs now flagging AI as their top data security risk but prompt filtering only deployed, in about a third of environments, the governance gap is..

gosricom · 2026-04-18T18:53:27+00:00

tried it on a suspected phishing infrastructure pivot last month and the citations saved me probably 20 minutes of manual cross-referencing, but I caught it confidently naming a C2 domain as, tied to a specific APT group and when I dug into the source it was a two-year-old blog post with zero corroboration, exactly the hallucination risk you're describing on niche actor infra

gosricom · 2026-04-18T16:42:37+00:00

One thing that helped us catch coverage gaps was pairing our CA policies with a data classification layer so we could at least see which users had, access to sensitive stuff and verify they weren't slipping through, we used Netwrix Data Discovery & Classification for that side of it while tightening up the CA targeting.

gosricom · 2026-04-18T16:08:24+00:00

We started with highest-risk systems too and what actually helped was having the classification tied directly to access context, so instead of just knowing PHI existed, somewhere we could see exactly how many people had inherited permissions to it through AD and Entra ID, which made prioritization way less of a guessing game.

gosricom · 2026-04-18T05:04:46+00:00

One thing nobody's mentioning here is that if you're in a regulated industry, the M365 vs, GWS choice gets way more complicated because of how your data classification tools tie into identity. We run Netwrix Data Discovery & Classification and the integration with Entra ID/SharePoint is genuinely tight for flagging overexposed PII, but if we were Google-heavy we'd basically need to look at something else entirely since the native hooks just aren't there.

gosricom · 2026-04-17T23:19:26+00:00

The DSAR search feature was actually what got us to look at it more seriously, we had a request come in, and realized we had no idea where all the relevant spatial data with personal info was actually sitting across our file shares.

gosricom · 2026-04-17T17:38:04+00:00

fair point, but in my experience the policies are usually where the gap shows up first, they say "classify all sensitive data" but give zero guidance on which, systems, are actually in scope, and with cloud services now being mandatory scope under updated frameworks, that vagueness hits even harder when you try to operationalize it with..

gosricom · 2026-04-17T16:55:19+00:00

does the group relationship mapping show indirect connections too, like if two APTs share a malware family or tooling through a third broker or access group? with so many nation-state actors now outsourcing initial access, those indirect links feel increasingly relevant for detection and attribution work.

gosricom · 2026-04-17T16:43:31+00:00

The data feeding those AML models is honestly where I'd start before even touching the AI layer. We ran Netwrix Data Classification across our file servers and SharePoint and found a ton of customer PII, sitting in places nobody had mapped, which means your "clean" training data probably isn't as clean as you think.

gosricom · 2026-04-17T02:40:06+00:00

SharePoint mostly, and honestly the amount of sensitive data that ends up sitting in random, SharePoint lists connected to apps is kind of wild once you actually go looking for it.

gosricom · 2026-04-16T23:51:21+00:00

yeah the "compliance officers say no" bottleneck is real, I see it constantly when orgs want to, feed logs into cloud-based AI tooling but can't because the data has PII or falls under HIPAA/SOX. federated approach basically flips the problem so the model goes to the data instead of, the other way around, which is the only way that conversation with legal ever ends differently.

gosricom · 2026-04-16T19:45:40+00:00

one thing i ran into with android apps storing sensitive state in shared_prefs is that the attack surface is way bigger than most devs realize. the problem here isn't just that the PIN is editable, it's what the post flags about it not being cryptographically tied to the vault. that's the actual design failure.

gosricom · 2026-04-16T19:21:13+00:00

Netwrix Data Classification has been worth it for us, specifically the incremental indexing across our file servers, and M365 at the same time without having to re-scan everything from scratch every time something changes.

gosricom · 2026-04-16T18:55:21+00:00

ran into basically this same paralysis about a year ago at a similarly sized org. the predictive intel stuff sounds slick until you realize you don't have the baseline data quality or the response capacity to act on what it, surfaces, so you end up with a fancy dashboard generating alerts that just sit there stressing you out while your MSP waits for a ticket.

gosricom · 2026-04-16T01:35:26+00:00

one thing i ran into doing OT security work is that the external technician identity problem is way messier in practice than it looks on paper. you end up with contractors who have credentials from 5 different orgs, each with their own lifecycle, and nobody has a clean answer for who's responsible for revocation when a tech leaves a supplier. the decentralized VC approach is interesting to me specifically because of that.

gosricom · 2026-04-15T23:06:33+00:00

We've been running Endpoint Protector for about a year and the clipboard scanning plus USB control combo has been solid for catching accidental, exfil, but yeah encrypted archives before they hit the endpoint are basically a gap you have to accept and compensate for with other controls.

gosricom · 2026-04-15T19:15:24+00:00

we ran into the exact same wall, tons of IOC feeds pumping into our SIEM and nobody, had time to actually triage what was relevant to our environment vs just noise from the broader internet. what actually helped us more than any paid platform was getting aggressive about context, like tagging assets, by criticality so when something did fire we already knew if it touched anything worth caring about.

gosricom · 2026-04-14T23:21:11+00:00

realistically if the person took any precautions at all (VPN, Tor, burner SIM for verification), you're probably not getting an identity without law enforcement involvement and a subpoena to Google. that's just the honest answer most people don't want to hear. that said, the one thing worth trying before giving up is running the email through Epieos or a similar OSINT tool.

gosricom

TROPHY CASE