Thales | Security for What Matters Most
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Thales | Security for What Matters Most
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Data Privacy Day is an opportunity to reassess how we protect personal data in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. While many organizations have traditionally focused on breaches and database security, today’s environment calls for a broader, more proactive approach to privacy.
Personal data is increasingly accessed through bots, APIs, and automated systems operating within legitimate workflows, often without triggering traditional alerts. This shift creates a powerful opportunity to modernize privacy strategies so they account not only for external threats, but also for how data is accessed, shared, and used across connected systems. By building stronger controls into the technologies we deploy, organizations can move beyond reactive protection and take a more intentional, resilient approach to safeguarding personal data.
Designing Privacy Into Every Access Decision
Traditionally, privacy measures have focused on securing databases, encrypting files, and adhering to compliance checklists. But the reality today is that privacy often fails when we grant access without sufficient oversight.
Every API call or automated workflow is a potential access point, a privacy backdoor that enterprises often forget to lock. APIs can authenticate legitimately, operate as expected, and still extract vast amounts of personal data without ever triggering traditional security controls.
Unsupervised AI agents pose an even greater problem, inferring, memorizing, and redistributing sensitive information in ways that existing privacy frameworks (written for humans, not autonomous agents) never anticipated, raising urgent questions about accountability when AI agents misuse that data.
Asking ourselves, “Is the data secure?” is now too broad a question, leaving many subtle points unaddressed. We must ask ourselves “Who and what is accessing the data, through which workflows, and under what context?” Without answers to those questions, personal data is at risk even if no breach occurs.
This new reality underscores the importance of identity-first controls, such as those offered by the Thales IAM portfolio. As data is increasingly accessed by APIs, bots, and AI agents operating at machine speed, enforcing least-privilege access, adaptive authentication, and context-aware policies across both human and non-human identities is essential to prevent silent data exfiltration that traditional security controls can miss.
Business Logic is the New Privacy Perimeter
Identity defines who and what can access data. Business logic defines how and what data can be accessed. Every API endpoint, AI-enabled workflow, and application function determines what data can be accessed, by whom, under which conditions, and how often. Essentially, that makes business logic the privacy perimeter.
When that logic is too permissive or not designed to handle automation at scale, privacy fails. Privacy breaches are increasingly stemming from attackers abusing legitimate workflows, such as refunds, account changes, and data access paths, at scale. This proves that protecting data ultimately means protecting how applications are intended to function.
This is why API-centric attacks are now one of the fastest-growing drivers of data exposure. Automated actors no longer need to exploit vulnerabilities. They extract data simply by interacting with APIs at scale and speed that humans can’t match.
Combating this threat requires adopting application security platforms that are flexible, privacy-first, and API-focused. Imperva Unified API Security Platform continuously discovers APIs, analyzes traffic behavior, detects business logic abuse, and responds in real time – especially to attacks like BOLA, which can harvest sensitive data through authorized API calls.
Bots Are a Silent Privacy Threat
Bots, scripts, and automated processes are quietly eroding privacy. Again, they don’t break into systems; they behave like regular users, follow legitimate workflows, and stay under rate limits. This allows them to extract personal data without triggering alerts or traditional breach detection tools. Essentially, they have authorized access, and can abuse it.
Even seemingly small activities can add up. A single bot making ten API calls per day can harvest millions of records over days or weeks, all while appearing perfectly normal to monitoring tools. This is the type of subtle, ongoing privacy erosion that regulations and traditional security measures often overlook.
Imperva Advanced Bot Protection capabilities take a multi-layered approach to mitigating bot attacks. It combines direct client interrogation, behavior analysis, machine learning (ML), connection characteristics, and threat intelligence to separate between human, good, and bad bot traffic, creating a unique fingerprint that withstands even the most sophisticated evasion techniques.
Encryption and Compliance Aren’t Enough
As any good compliance officer knows, encryption at rest and in transit is a non-negotiable. But encryption doesn’t stop authorized misuse. It doesn’t prevent an API from returning too much data under the wrong conditions. It doesn’t stop bots with valid tokens from making thousands of requests. And it doesn’t help you answer the key privacy questions:
- Who accessed this record?
- Under what conditions?
- Was the access intention consistent with policy?
To truly secure privacy, you need tools that unify data protection with identity-centric access control and behavioral context. That’s exactly what Thales Data Risk Intelligence does. It combines posture and behavior-based risk indicators with proactive mitigation, giving teams real-time visibility into who is accessing data, how, and whether it aligns with policy, enabling them to act before sensitive information is exposed.
This Data Privacy Day, traditional approaches to security are no longer enough. Protecting data today requires identity-first access controls, behavioral monitoring, and business-logic aware API protection.