The Complete Guide to Slack Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in 2024

Data loss can be severe, ranging from regulatory compliance violations to reputational damage and financial loss.

The 2017 Uber data breach exemplifies the risks associated with insufficient DLP measures. Hackers accessed Uber's software repository on GitHub by stealing credentials from an engineer's Slack account, exposing personal data for 57 million users. By acknowledging and proactively addressing the problem, organizations can maintain regulatory compliance and avoid financial and reputational damage.

With over 750K organizations relying on Slack, implementing Slack Data Loss Prevention (DLP) measures to safeguard sensitive information becomes crucial. 

This blog highlights the importance of robust security measures and vigilance in safeguarding our online assets and preventing unauthorized access. We will delve into the details of Slack’s compliance with strict data security standards like CCPA, GDPR, PCI, and HIPAA to safeguard users' sensitive information.

What is Slack DLP (Data Loss Prevention)?

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) safeguards confidential or sensitive information—such as credit card numbers, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and API keys, passwords—from being shared outside of Slack. It achieves this by scanning messages and files for content that violates predefined policies.

DLP is crucial for maintaining both security and compliance. Implementing DLP enables you to:

• Prevent users from inadvertently or deliberately sharing sensitive information.
• Educate and guide users on your data sharing policies.
• Ensure adherence to regulations like HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR.
• Deter toxic behavior, including the use of profanity.
• Minimize the manual effort required to review content shared on Slack.

Why do I need a DLP solution for Slack?

Deploying a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution for Slack is essential for several reasons:

• Protection Against Data Breaches: Organizations face significant risks from data breaches, which can lead to monetary losses and reputational damage. A DLP solution helps prevent sensitive data from being inadvertently shared or leaked, minimizing the risk of such breaches.
• Regulatory Compliance: Multiple industries are governed by strict regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, which mandate the protection of sensitive information. A DLP solution ensures that your organization complies with these regulations by monitoring & controlling the flow of sensitive data within Slack.
• Visibility and Control: With a DLP solution, organizations gain better visibility into their data usage within Slack. This includes identifying what types of sensitive information are being shared and where potential vulnerabilities lie. By having control over data sharing policies, organizations can enforce compliance and security measures effectively.
• Employee Training and Awareness: A DLP solution can also facilitate better training for employees regarding data security practices. By integrating real-time notifications and alerts about policy violations, employees become more aware of the risks associated with sharing sensitive information in Slack.

In summary, a DLP solution is crucial for safeguarding sensitive information, ensuring compliance with legal requirements, and enhancing overall data security within your organization.

What Types of Sensitive Information Might Slack Contain?

Business administrators should recognize that Slack can hold various forms of sensitive information, such as:

• PII (Personally Identifiable Information): Names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal identifiers.
• PHI (Protected Health Information): Medical records and other health-related data governed by strict privacy regulations.
• PCI (Payment Card Industry data): Credit card numbers, bank routing numbers, account holder details, and more.
• IP (Intellectual Property): Valuable company information, trade secrets, and proprietary data.

Slack retains data from paid accounts indefinitely and from free workspaces for up to a year. This means that any information shared by users is stored in Slack unless users remove it or administrators set up retention policies to regularly purge content. Research shows that employees often use workplace tools to share work-related content, including sensitive data, without realizing the potential risks. To manage the spread of sensitive and confidential information in Slack, it's essential to combine employee training with a strong information governance strategy and tools that can enforce data removal within Slack.

Are Slack Messages Truly Private?

‍Users can only view messages in public channels, private channels, Slack Connect channels they belong to, and direct messages exchanged with others. However, depending on the Slack plan, workspace administrators may have access to all user messages, including direct messages.Even with free or lower-tier plans that don't include full access to user messages, businesses may still be able to recover them directly from Slack by requesting access. This capability ensures companies can meet security and compliance requirements, conduct internal investigations, and respond to legal requests. Generally, business users should assume that workspace administrators can access all their messages and content within Slack.

Does Slack have a built-in DLP?

No Slack relies on third-party apps (like Strac) for DLP functionality, so a dedicated solution is crucial for HIPAA compliance. Strac is a Slack DLP partner.

If your organization needs to adhere to HIPAA regulations, it's essential to have a DLP solution in place when using Slack.

What sensitive information does Slack hold?

Slack can contain various types of sensitive information that require protection, including:

• Personally Identifiable Information (PII): This includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other identifiers that can be used to identify individuals.
• Financial Information: Sensitive financial data such as CC numbers, bank account details, or any proprietary financial documents shared within the platform.
• Intellectual Property: Confidential company documents, project plans, or proprietary technology that could be detrimental if exposed to unauthorized parties.
• Health Information: For organizations in the healthcare sector, Slack may hold sensitive health records or personal health information (PHI) that is required to be protected under regulations like HIPAA.

Given that Slack retains data from paid accounts indefinitely and from free accounts for up to a year unless deleted by users or administrators, it is critical to implement robust DLP measures to manage this sensitive information effectively. 

Slack Data Loss Prevention: Secret Scanning: Protecting Passwords, API Keys, OAuth Tokens, Private Keys

Why is a DLP solution necessary for Slack?

‍If Slack is a key communication tool in your organization, it's crucial to secure the data shared within it. Just as you would safeguard a Google Drive spreadsheet containing sensitive customer financial data, Slack deserves the same level of protection. Despite its appearance as a private platform, Slack can still be a prime target for cyberattacks if it contains sensitive information.To protect your data, maintain customer trust, and comply with national and international regulations, it's essential to implement a DLP solution like Strac for your Slack environment.

Slack Connect and DLP

With Slack Connect's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) feature, securing cross-company collaboration just got easier. You can now, 

• minimize the risk of sharing sensitive and confidential information with external organizations,
• monitor all channels and direct messages sent and received by your organization's users, ensuring that nothing breaches your established policies, and
• control your data and collaborate with external partners confidently and seamlessly

But that’s not all, here are a few benefits of Slack Connect and DLP⬇️

1. Admin privileges

The organization's primary owners and members with admin system roles can assign DLP admin system roles to other members. DLP admins can enhance security by creating custom rules using regular expression (regex) format to effectively flag messages or files for administrative action.

They have the flexibility to choose whether to hide tombstone messages or files until they can be reviewed. This feature leads to an efficient review process, ensuring that potential violations are not overlooked. DLP admins play a crucial role in maintaining compliance by reviewing rule violations and taking appropriate action on flagged messages and files.

2. Security alerts

Managing alerts for policy violations in your organization has never been easier. With the Slack DLP dashboard, you'll receive instant alerts whenever a member sends a message that violates a DLP rule. From the dashboard, you can efficiently handle these alerts by archiving them, deleting the corresponding message, or restoring it if it was initially hidden. 

3. Seamless data management

Ensure seamless data management within your organization with advanced retention settings in Slack. Rest assured that messages and files sent by your members will be subject to your organization's retention policies. 

Any content received from individuals outside of your company will be handled based on their respective organization's retention settings. In addition, Slack’s message editing and deletion settings are tailored specifically for your organization. Only members of your team can edit or delete messages sent by them, ensuring complete control over communication within your workspace.

4. Powerful encryption

Starting September 2020, Enterprise Key Management (EKM) is now available for Slack Connect. This update ensures that messages and files sent by members of your organization are encrypted using your own keys. And here's the best part - if you're already an EKM customer, this encryption will also be applied retroactively to previous communications. If other companies are also EKM customers, any messages or files they send you will be encrypted with their keys. With EKM, you can ensure the utmost security and protection for all your communications on Slack Connect.

5. Content regulation

Organizations can now leverage e-discovery and data loss prevention (DLP) solutions to effectively review and regulate content across channels and DMs shared with individuals from other companies. 

The Discovery API allows all organizations to access and read content in channels and DMs shared with external parties. However, only messages and files sent by members of your own organization within a channel or DM can be edited or deleted using the Discovery API. While using user methods, the Discovery API will return the display names of members from external organizations. 

However, this information will not be displayed alongside the conversation history. Regardless of an organization's email display settings, email addresses of members from external organizations will be returned via Discovery API.

Essential functionalities for a DLP

When considering data loss prevention (DLP) functionalities for Slack, it is crucial to look for these essential features. 

1. Content analysis

The DLP solution should be able to scan messages, files, and other content shared within channels and direct messages. It should be able to analyze the content for sensitive information like personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, intellectual property, or any other confidential information. By ensuring a robust content scanning feature in your DLP solution for Slack, you can proactively identify and prevent potential data breaches or leaks. This ultimately helps safeguard your organization's reputation and ensures compliance with regulatory requirements.

2. Flexibility

Organizations should be free to establish and tailor DLP rules to meet their unique requirements for data security. Administrators should be able to establish guidelines and scenarios that result in policy breaches using specific patterns or keywords. It should also monitor policy violations and take appropriate actions.

3. Real-time alerts

The DLP solution should provide real-time alerts and notifications to notify administrators promptly of policy violations. This lets them immediately address the violation, minimizing data loss or exposure risks. Additionally, the automated actions offered by the DLP solution ensure consistent policy enforcement. Based on the severity of policy violations, these automated actions may include warning the user, blocking the message from being sent, or quarantining the content for review.

4. Actionable insights

DLP solutions should provide visibility into policy breaches, data leakage events, and trends to enable robust reporting and auditing capabilities. These insights help companies assess their situation and make well-informed decisions to improve it.

5. Slack DLP Integration with other tools

It should integrate seamlessly with other tools to improve enterprise data security options. It should ensure total security using data loss prevention solutions, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, or other applicable safety measures.

6. Customization

It should provide the option to add custom detectors, rules, keywords, regexes, and pre-built detectors that cover a wide range of data types. It should be able to scan files and messages from various file categories, including xls/xlsx, doc/docx, CSV, plain text, ppt/pptx, PDF, HTML, and others.

Does Slack have DLP Support for Pro and Business+ Plan?

No. Slack does not offer native DLP support for Pro and Business+ Plan

Does Slack have DLP Support for Enterprise Grid Plan?

Yes. Slack has DLP support for Enterprise Grid Plan. Please see below the limitations of Slack DLP.

Does DLP work on any Slack plan?

Many DLP solutions don’t support every Slack plan. Strac is the only DLP solution that supports all Slack plans - Free, Pro, Business+ and Enterprise Plans. Learn more.

What are the Slack Enterprise DLP Limitations?

Even for Enterprises, Slack's native DLP is not enough. It does not do the following:

1. Slack Enterprise DLP will not redact sensitive Slack messages: Not everyone needs to see customer PII or sensitive information in files; however, it is perfectly valid for users to see messages without the sensitive information
2. Slack Enterprise DLP will not redact sensitive files/attachments: Slack DLP does not do any kind of redaction or masking within Slack Enterprise DLP‍
3. Slack Enterprise DLP will not prevent file sharing for  users: All DLPs today are all-or-none, i.e., either they will block configured sensitive files OR they will allow them. The blanket block or allow does not work in the practical world. For example: it is OK to share sensitive files between certain team members (e.g., customer success) and the end-user (e.g., customer); however, not all team members have the permission to send.
4. Slack Enterprise DLP is all regex based and will not scan/detect unstructured documents like pdf, jpg, png, image, docx, screenshot, etc.

What are the Drawbacks of Creating Your Own DLP Solution for Slack?

The primary disadvantages of implementing the described measures include:

1. Inadequate Visibility into Sensitive Files: From a security perspective, there's a blind spot regarding the quantity of sensitive files on Slack, including those shared internally and externally. This lack of insight is a significant risk as it prevents understanding the full scope of potentially exposed data.
2. Obscured Visibility of File Downloads: Leaders in business and security have no clear way to track who downloads or shares files, posing a risk to information security.
3. Dependence on Manual Monitoring: The task of regularly checking for suspicious activities heavily relies on the manual efforts of employees, requiring them to identify unusual patterns, which is not always reliable.
4. Resource-Intensive Training: Educating employees on recognizing suspicious behaviors demands a considerable investment of time and resources, with ongoing training necessary to maintain awareness.
5. Susceptibility to Errors: Despite training, the human capacity to accurately identify sensitive versus non-sensitive content at scale is limited and prone to errors, which can be costly if overlooked.
6. Lack of Comprehensive Coverage: The landscape of security threats is ever-evolving, making it impossible to train individuals to recognize every possible type of attack, thus leaving gaps in security coverage.

What does DLP detect?

1. DLP solutions should be capable of scanning a wide range of data types, including personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), finance and payment card information (PCI), health data, networking information, and credentials & secrets (such as API keys and cryptographic keys).
2. Strac offers pre-built detectors that cover an extensive set of data types, industries, and geographies right out of the box. Additionally, Strac allows you to incorporate custom detectors, rules, keywords, and regexes.
3. Explore Strac's catalog of sensitive data elements to learn more.

Does DLP scan my entire Slack organization?

1. You should choose a DLP solution that scans both files and messages.
2. Strac supports a wide variety of file types, including but not limited to xls/xlsx, doc/docx, csv, plain text, ppt/pptx, PDF, HTML, and more.

How Does Strac Help You Stay Compliant With Even the Toughest Benchmarks?

Maintaining data security compliance within Slack can be a daunting task. But with Strac, a powerful DLP (Data Loss Prevention) solution, you no longer have to do it alone. Strac provides comprehensive monitoring and visibility into your data and systems. 

By filtering data streams, it effectively restricts any suspicious or unidentified activity. It also enables you to log data for incident response and auditing purposes. Strac brings everything together to help prevent customer data from falling into the wrong hands. Compliance standards include GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, CCPA, and SOC 2.

Here are several ways to enhance your compliance requirements with Strac for Slack Connect filter policies:

• Quickly identify and safeguard sensitive data that requires protection and promptly address policy violations based on your unique compliance requirements.
• Establish an external sharing policy within your Slack Connect channels to configure individual rules. You can also utilize multiple policies simultaneously for maximum control within your Slack environment.
• Gain visibility into your channels. Understand who is connected to your organization via Slack Connect channels. Without a comprehensive view of these channels, your attack surface could quickly escalate beyond manageable levels.

How Does Strac DLP Secure Your Slack Data?

Protecting sensitive customer information is crucial for Slack users. With Strac, an advanced DLP software integrated into the Slack app, you can ensure account security and prevent unauthorized file sharing.

• One of the standout features of Strac is its redaction experience. It intelligently identifies and redacts/blocks sensitive customer data such as PII, PHI, or PCI within private channels, public channels, direct messages (DMs), and group direct messages, keeping important data confidential.
• Strac provides audit reports giving you full visibility and control over your data.
• Safeguarding sensitive information is crucial, so our catalog automatically detects and redacts potential risks. But that's not all – Strac, masks or removes sensitive messages and files while allowing authorized users to access them securely in the Strac UI Vault.
• In addition to safeguarding your data, Strac also prevents unauthorized file sharing on channels or through Slack Connect when configured. This means you have full control over who can access and share files within your workspace.
• The best part? Strac works seamlessly across all Slack channels and pricing plans, making it accessible for everyone. And with security and compliance officers receiving detailed audit reports on message access, you can rest assured that your data is safe. Check out how Strac can secure your Slack workspace.

Sensitive Data Types for Slack DLP

Strac offers extensive support for a wide array of sensitive data elements in global formats, covering identity details (such as driver’s licenses and passports), healthcare IDs, financial information, intellectual property, and more. Equipped with advanced detection and remediation capabilities, Strac delivers thorough data security and compliance across SaaS applications, cloud databases, AI platforms, and endpoint devices. This broad support empowers organizations to protect essential data efficiently. For a detailed list, check out Strac's blog on sensitive data elements.

Conclusion

When it comes to audits, meeting compliance requirements can be a challenging task. Many compliance regimes have open-ended requirements that need to be addressed. 

That's where implementing a SaaS Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution can make all the difference. Strac offers a quick and easy step toward ensuring your organization has the right compliance in place for audits. By automating daily tasks and streamlining data protection processes, our DLP solution helps you meet compliance requirements efficiently.

What’s more? Strac’s powerful features can help you enhance the security of your sensitive information, ensuring seamless collaboration among team members. From preventing accidental data leaks to identifying potential risks, Strac offers a robust solution that helps safeguard your organization's valuable data. 

Explore more on Slack security:

• Slack HIPAA Compliance
• How to secure Slack?