Pain Point 1: Why is Sensitive Data Overexposed in Google Drive?

This is a 7 part series that will be released in segments - this first section focuses on why sensitive data is overexposed within Google Workspace.

Background

Google Workspace has completely revolutionized the way organizations do business, resulting in increased collaboration, productivity and efficiency. Sounds great, right? The only drawback is that all this collaboration comes with a price: an organization’s security is compromised, overexposed data leads to data loss and financial cost, and an organization’s reputation might suffer irreversible damage.

Google Workspace is NOT a Security Solution

Yes, Google Workspace is a super-productive collaboration platform. But it has critical gaps when it comes to security, especially protecting and accessing your data, authenticating identities, and monitoring compliance. Learn more about strengthening your Google Drive security to mitigate these risks.

Let’s take a closer look at 7 pain points that pose a critical threat to an organization’s security posture: 

1. Sensitive company data is overexposed on Google Drive - Google Workspace is susceptible to attacks that potentially compromise sensitive information: a staggering 94% of organizations reported phishing attacks in 2024 (Egress Email Security Risk Report). There’s limited visibility into data access, and it’s impossible to know the exact locations of all sensitive assets across Google Drive, and how they’re exposed. Overexposure of sensitive data opens the door to data exfiltration and even malicious data breaches. 

2. Google Workspace DLP capabilities are limited - They cannot prevent your employees from exfiltrating data through their personal accounts, sharing with external collaborators, or downloading data to endpoints. File sharing permissions are view or edit only, and Google Workspace lacks native tools to prevent sensitive data loss, resulting in unauthorized sharing and potential leakage. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to remediate overexposure of large volumes of data.

3. Insider threats and identity challenges - Employees are said to be the weak link in an organization’s security chain, and leaving or disgruntled employees can pose the biggest threat. It’s relatively easy for about-to-leave employees to download large volumes of assets, or worse, delete files. A Google Workspace vulnerability recently allowed hackers to bypass the email verification step when creating accounts, and impersonate legitimate account owners. Even more threatening is that Google’s domain-wide delegation can unintentionally give users unauthorized access to an entire Workspace domain.‍

4. Google labels alone don’t prevent data loss - On the one hand, Google labels help to organize, find, and apply policies to files in your Drive. But the more Google labels your organization has, the harder it is to search for specific assets. Google labels don’t provide granular access control. Your organization still needs robust permission settings to ensure sensitive documents aren't accidentally exposed or shared with unauthorized parties.

5. Malicious or unsanctioned 3rd party shadow apps - The average organization uses over 1200 apps, increasing the potential attack surface. If not properly managed, the proliferation of shadow apps installed in your Google Workspace increases the probability of unauthorized access.

6. Challenge of meeting compliance requirements across Google Workspace - Google Workspace’s default settings don’t necessarily meet strict regulation requirements, such as GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA. To ensure compliance,  organizations need to invest in manual effort or third-party tools.‍

7. Difficulty in pinpointing your riskiest use cases and security threats across the organization - With so much data at our fingertips, it becomes a challenge to differentiate high-risk user behavior from medium- or low-risk. We need to know clearly what use cases and anomalies we’re looking for before we can actually see it.

There is a solution. You can bridge your Google Workspace security gaps seamlessly with DoControl, an agentless automated solution that remedies each pain point with ease, without impacting your productivity.

Most security solutions on the market will protect your organization’s endpoint - be it a laptop or mobile device - from being attacked and infecting the entire organization. But these solutions don’t take into account, or even correlate, the user’s behavior across SaaS apps. DoControl connects the data dots between Google Workspace and all your SaaS apps, including Slack, HRIS and IdPs, to provide your organization with a robust security solution based uniquely on enriched data context.

Pain point #1: Sensitive company data is overexposed on Google Drive 

‍Challenge: My organization has implemented all of Google Workspace Enterprise's built-in security features, and still, assets are overexposed. We see sensitive data and intellectual property being exposed outside the organization to legacy contractors, even appearing in Google search results on the web. This sharing isn’t essential for our business, but it’s happening, and it’s compromising our data security.

‍Solution: DoControl provides you instant visibility into your sensitive asset exposure across your entire organization’s Google Drive, with powerful filtering capabilities to drill-down into your riskiest use cases. Detecting there’s a problem is the first step to solving it. With DoControl monitoring, detecting and showcasing your asset overexposure across your entire Google Drive, you’re just two clicks away from remediating it. 

Google Workspace Security is NOT Enough

Imagine you've got this amazing security system for your digital office - Google Workspace Enterprise - but it's like having a fancy lock on your front door while leaving the windows wide open. Sure, you've got protection, but there are plenty of ways your data can leave the office.

Even with Google Workspace's security layers in place, human error remains one of the leading causes of data overexposure. Users may unknowingly share sensitive documents or set incorrect permissions on files or folders, and it’s unlikely that Google Workspace security would catch these breaches. These slip-ups can cost your company time and money, not to mention reputational damage. 

Examples of human errors:

• An employee in accounting accidentally shares a confidential report with the wrong email, inadvertently exposing confidential information.
  

• Someone unknowingly shares a sensitive document with “Anyone with the link,” rather than specific recipients. This indexes the file by Google search engines, making it accessible to anyone on the Internet.
  

• Even worse, about-to-leave employees can deliberately share confidential assets and contact lists with their personal emails.

Google Drive DLP is Limited in Scope and Accuracy

The Data Loss Prevention (DLP) feature in Google Drive scans your Docs, Sheets and Slides to detect sensitive data and prevent it from being shared. These scans use Google's predefined detectors, custom regular expressions, and word lists, resulting in a high percentage of false positives and false negatives. Drive-wide DLP scans are also extremely slow, taking from hours to days to complete. 

Google Drive DLP is significantly limited in both scope and accuracy. DLP scans without user context means that your policies will either be overzealous and obstruct productivity, or they’ll overlook risk in an attempt to facilitate business workflows.

Only the first 1 MB of each file is scanned, so if sensitive information is found after the first 1 MB of content, the file won’t be classified as sensitive. Some files larger than 10 MB are not scanned at all. Google Drive DLP does not scan audio or video files, or comments.

‍Lack of granular controls for sharing

‍If data loss prevention (DLP) is not enforced as strictly as needed across the entire organization, users can still share files outside the organization or with external unauthorized users. Google Drive DLP provides some data protection, but will inevitably miss the use cases that go beyond its limited capacities.

Employees are the Weak Link in Collaboration Security

Security for Google Workspace is not a one-time setup, but a continuous effort. It involves creating layers of protection, regularly reviewing security settings, training your team, and staying vigilant. For security to be effective, everyone needs to know how to use the system and cybersecurity needs to be an essential part of your organizational culture. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to implement best security practices across an entire organization all the time. While Google Workspace Enterprise might offer robust security features, your employees are the weak link in your security chain:

• Employees might accidentally share sensitive documents with unauthorized external parties

• Employees won’t necessarily remember to remove external permissions from files after a project has ended

• Disgruntled employees, who still have access to sensitive company data, can easily access and share it with their personal email or other parties 

Despite built-in Google security features, your data is still accessible. Human error remains a critical vulnerability and can lead to inadvertent or deliberate data exposure.

DoControl gives instant visibility into your exposed assets

DoControl discovers your Google Workspace attack surface by mapping all assets, users, and shadow apps, and classifying them according to level of sensitivity, usage, and exposure. See exactly when each Google asset was last viewed and by whom.In a single glance, identify your organizational exposure and prioritize your remediation plan. Our exposure analysis helps you to focus on your main vulnerabilities and security risks:

• How many external users can access your Google Drive?
  You might discover legacy contractors or former employees who can still access your assets.
  
  
• How many external domains have access to your assets?
  Detect if any of your assets are shared with a non-trusted or even malicious domain.
  
  
• What company assets are accessible by former employees?
  With DoControl’s dynamically updated groups, you can easily identify any assets shared with terminated employees.
  
  
• How many sensitive assets are shared with external users?
  Make sure any files with PII (personally identifiable information) or financial or proprietary information are not being shared with users outside your organization.
  
  
• How many sensitive public assets are shared?
  Organizations are usually surprised to see how many of their assets are shared with the entire world.
  
  
• How many employees share with their personal emails?
  Detect if any of your employees are exfiltrating assets to their personal emails.
  
  
• How many inactive assets are still exposed externally and publicly?
  Inactive assets that haven’t been viewed in the last 6 months increase your attack surface.

Slice and dice your entire Google asset inventory

DoControl’s powerful filtering capabilities let you slice and dice your entire Google Drive in any number of ways, giving you granular and accurate results in seconds. Pinpoint your riskiest exposure use cases with a few clicks:

• Search assets by external collaborator’s email - There’s one or more external users who you want to remove from shared company assets. Enter an exact or partial email address, or multiple emails, to display all assets shared with specific collaborators. You can also leverage DoControl’s lexical lists to search for all collaborators in a specific list.
  
  
• Locate assets shared with a specific group - DoControl dynamically generates your riskiest groups to monitor overexposure. Filter all Google assets shared with a specific HR group, such as about-to-leave or terminated employees. Or discover which assets are shared with your employees’ personal emails.
  
  
• Locate assets shared with a specific domain - If your organization was working with an external company and you don’t want that company to have further access to your assets, you can filter all assets shared with that organization’s domain and remediate accordingly.
  
  
• Protect sensitive documents from search over-exposure - If employees across your organization can search for files containing health or financial details (personally identifiable information) that are searchable, there’s a risk this sensitive data will be over-exposed. With DoControl, you can locate all Google assets with the Searchable sharing status and immediately remove org-wide sharing links.

Once you’ve located all assets that meet your exposure criteria, it’s easy to bulk remediate with a few clicks.

Only DoControl gives you historic exposure

With DoControl’s last view date, you can see who last viewed your Google assets 6 months prior to integrating with DoControl. Filter across your entire Google Drive and get results instantaneously.This capability is unique to DoControl, and not available in Google Workspace.

Easy filtering with company-wide inventory views

Let’s say you want to keep your eye on all sensitive Google assets from the Finance and HR departments that are shared with specific external collaborators, or shared with employees’ own personal emails. It would be tedious to set up these filters again and again just to understand your asset exposure.With DoControl inventory views, you can save your search sessions and filters and return to them with the click of a button. You can even set one as your main view, giving you the flexibility to immediately see your asset and user exposure based on your security policies.

Take-away

Google Workspace security isn’t enough to monitor data movement across complex organizational structures. Unauthorized data sharing, over-permissioning, and overexposure of stale documents can lead to exfiltration of sensitive data and data loss.With DoControl, you can govern your Google Workspace security with 100% confidence that your data exposure analysis is accurate. One needs to detect there’s a problem before solving it. With DoControl showcasing all your asset overexposure across your entire Google Drive, you’re just two clicks away from remediating it.

FREE Google Workspace Risk Assessment

The first step in securing your Google Workspace is to assess and understand your risks. That's why we offer a free Google Workspace risk assessment that provides the insights you need to identify existing risks and determine the actions required to mitigate them. 

If you are interested, feel free to reach out to our team - click here.