It sometimes appears that it is impossible for organizations to protect personally identifiable information (PII) effectively. Over the last few years there have been spectacular failures in the pharmaceutical, retail, education, government, and financial services sectors. Tens of millions of consumers have had their PII lost or stolen, and these losses have cost both the responsible companies and the consumers hundreds of millions of dollars.

According to Gartner, TJX’s reported loss of over 45 million consumer credit card records will cost the company between $250 and $500 million. There are many more tangible loss cases similar to TJX, as well as intangible loss cases in which organizations such as Eli Lilly found themselves under an FTC consent decree due to FTC perceptions of failure to protect PII.

What are the real causes for these losses? Some possible answers include human error, malfeasance, lack of appropriate security controls, improper budget prioritization, lack of training and awareness. But even if organizations who are the custodians of consumer PII were able to address all of these gaps, it would still be essential to obtain certainty that PII is not exiting the organization through some unauthorized communications channel.

NetWitness NextGen provides your organization a high level of assurance that PII is not leaving your network without your knowledge and authority. Next Gen is an enterprise software framework that captures all network traffic and reconstructs the network sessions to the application layer for automated alerting and monitoring, and interactive analysis and review. Part of NextGen’s approach includes the creation of metadata representations of the full network packet captures. Numerous metadata elements in NextGen are specifically tuned to parse the entire network traffic capture in real time for PII, regardless of the application protocol in use. PII is represented in the metadata in the form of nouns that can act as pivot points for an entire multi-terabyte network collection or data set.

With 10 years of patented, core technology developed for the most challenging missions of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities, NetWitness NextGen provides a comprehensive distributed network monitoring framework designed to ensure that your customer’s personally identifiable information (PII), your intellectual property, and your other sensitive data are protected from accidental and intentional leakage.

NetWitness Decoder and Concentrator comprise the underpinnings of an enterprise infrastructure providing comprehensive situational awareness and visibility into content and context of all network activity. When combined with power of automated reporting and alerting in Netwitness Informer and the interactive network forensics and analytics in NetWitness Investigator, your organization can acquire the Total Network Knowledge needed to feel confident that you will know when there sensitive data leaking from your network Enterprise.