Efficiently Identifying the Data Leakages

Abstract Data leakage is defined as the accidental or unintentional distribution of private or sensitive data to an unauthorized entity. Sensitive data in companies and organizations include intellectual property (IP), financial information, patient information, personal credit-card data, and other information depending on the business and the industry. Data leakage poses a serious issue for companies as the number of incidents and the cost to those experiencing them continue to increase. Data leakage is enhanced by the fact that transmitted data (both inbound and outbound), including emails, instant messaging, website forms, and file transfers among others, are largely unregulated and unmonitored on their way to their destinations. Furthermore, in many cases, sensitive data are shared among various stakeholders such as employees working from outside the organization's premises (e.g., on laptops), business partners, and customers. This increases the risk that confidential information will fall into unauthorized hands. Whether caused by malicious intent or an inadvertent mistake by an insider or outsider, exposure of sensitive information can seriously hurt an organization.The Data Leakage problem can be defined as any unauthorized access of data due to an improper implementation or inadequacy of a technology, process or a policy. The "unauthorized access" described above can be the result of a malicious, intentional, inadvertent data leakage, or a bad business/technology process from an internal or external user. Traditionally, this leakage of data is handled by water marking technique which requires modification of data. If the watermarked copy is found at some unauthorized site then distributor can claim his ownership. To overcome the disadvantages of using watermar