We are back with another Product Tip Tuesday!

In light of recent news that dozens of companies inadvertently leaked sensitive data due to misconfigured Box accounts, we have a special Product Tip Tuesday: Box Edition for you all.

Yesterday, a cybersecurity firm found that major companies were accidentally exposing sensitive data like bank account and Social Security numbers, passwords, employee lists, and customer data. How? All because employees were sharing public links to their Box files.

Many users share Box files and folders publicly without realizing the security implications. Public folders are scraped and indexed by search engines, making it easy to find sensitive data online. This creates a serious security risk, leaving your data exposed to anyone on the internet.

Fortunately, BetterCloud has a solution to help manage and secure your Box files and folders at scale. If a user violates your sharing policies, you can be alerted right away.

You can receive alerts when a confidential Box folder is shared, a Box file or folder is shared externally (or has a public sharing link), or a specific Box file is shared publicly, such as a finance or HR document.

With the granularity and flexibility of our alerts and workflows, you can create remediation paths that match your organization’s security approach.

Not only do our multi-step workflows allow you to automatically delete the file sharing link, lock the file, and remove all file collaborators, but they also allow you to notify IT, security, the user, and their manager via email or Slack.

Using our Dynamic Fields, you can customize the message to give the proper context so that admins will know what specifically has occurred.

Bonus tip: Identify suspicious user behavior in Box

Additionally, with BetterCloud, IT can identify behavior signifying that an employee is at risk of exiting with sensitive company data. For example, if the targeted user downloads a large amount of files in Box (or Dropbox) within a specified period of time, or accesses a sensitive file multiple times in a short window, IT can receive an alert and remediate the situation. This can help prevent the loss of sensitive proprietary information.

Additional relevant alerts to assist in these situations include:

• File/Folder Shared Externally
• File/Folder Shared Publicly
• File/Folder Previewed by User
• File/Folder Downloaded by User
• File/Folder Created
• File/Folder Deleted

For a deeper dive into file sharing policies, check out these articles on publicly shared files and externally shared files in the BetterCloud Help Center.