The Challenge
- Better understand employee behavior and strengthen best practices
- Protect sensitive client and financial data
- Gain insights and analytics to help IT team do more with less
The Solution
- Proofpoint Insider Threat Management
- Proofpoint Email Data Loss Prevention
The Results
- Insider Threat Management provides visibility and insights into risky activities
- Email Data Loss Prevention prevents accidental and intentional data loss over email
- Single unified view of solutions improves administrative efficiency
The Challenge
Protecting Sensitive Personal and Government Data
Linebarger firmly believes that its greatest asset is its people. The firm employs more than 1,200 employees nationwide and is proud to be among the most diverse law firms in the country.
With nearly 50 years of experience working with government entities, Linebarger professionals represent the gold standard in providing exceptional service to public sector clients. The firm’s ability to protect and secure sensitive data is a key value proposition for its clients.
“We handle government receivables at the city, county and state level—everything from outstanding fees and fines to delinquent taxes,” said LeWayne Ballard, CTO, Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, LLP. “Working with sensitive data means that security is our number one requirement and focus.”
Linebarger has an IT team of approximately 175 people, 10 of whom focus solely on security. Over the years, the firm has successfully protected its email communications with Proofpoint solutions.
“We used to be a Proofpoint on-premise customer, but as the firm grew its technology infrastructure, we switched to the cloud platform,” said Ballard. “We use a variety of Proofpoint tools, which range from Proofpoint Email Protection to the Targeted Attack Protection (TAP) dashboard.”
Deepening the firm’s security posture means it was able to bolster employee best practices.
“Mitigating external threats is a baseline best practice,” said Ballard. “You can roll out firewalls and other security platforms to defend against external threats, but they won’t address internal vulnerabilities. Internal threats are rarely malicious or intentional. They are often due to a lack of awareness and understanding. So we wanted to layer on additional guardrails to protect our employees and the firm.”
LeWayne Ballard, CTO, Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, LLP
The Solution
Toward a Stronger Culture of Security
Linebarger was looking for insider threat management (ITM) and data loss prevention (DLP) solutions that could integrate smoothly with its existing Proofpoint products. They also needed these solutions to support its many different processes and operations.
“We have different requirements from different government entities, so we need a vendor that can check all those boxes and isn’t just focused on one segment,” said Ballard.
To gain better control and visibility into employee practices, the firm uses Proofpoint Insider Threat Management. Proofpoint ITM provides visibility into risky behavior by unsuspecting, compromised or malicious users that can disrupt operational processes and impact revenues. It gathers irrefutable evidence to accelerate investigations. It enables organizations to work cross-functionally and provides the right response while mitigating business disruption and data loss.
With Proofpoint ITM, Linebarger has a complete view of user activity in an easy-to-grasp timeline that shows detailed behavior, as well as optional screenshots, of user activity. This lets Ballard and his team monitor internal vulnerabilities and detect risky behavior quickly and easily. Linebarger complements the solution with Proofpoint Email DLP.
“We’re using Proofpoint ITM and Email DLP to search all the emails,” said Ballard. “We can examine them for Payment Card Industry data, Social Security numbers and so forth.”
With a human-centric approach, Proofpoint Email DLP uses behavioral AI to help the organization prevent accidental and intentional data loss over email. This reduces Linebarger’s risk and remediation costs. It stops misdirected emails before they’re sent, and keeps the firm’s data from being sent to unauthorized email accounts—without slowing communications.
The Results
Bringing Technology and the Organization Together To Ensure Data Integrity
The new Proofpoint additions integrate seamlessly with the firm’s existing Proofpoint products. This provides Linebarger with a complete email solution.
“Our solution starts with a simple email gateway, where we use tools such as the URL rewriting and even automated headers to tell employees whether it’s from an external sender, an unknown sender, or possible imposter, as well as reviewing the links,” said Ballard. “Taking it a step further, Proofpoint ITM lets us understand user behaviors, identify the threats we need to protect against, and uncover any data movements or endpoint activities that we are not aware of.”
Ballard and his team were especially concerned about data exfiltration, such as users uploading sensitive data to cloud accounts without understanding the potential security risks. With Proofpoint ITM, the organization can detect this type of risky behavior in real time.
Ballard also appreciates the insights that Proofpoint Email DLP provides. This includes its user-friendly presentation of data to help employees work more productively, while controlling email risks.
“I was very impressed by the intelligence of Proofpoint Email DLP from the moment we did the proof of concept,” he said. “I looked at other DLP products years ago, but none of them managed to meet all of our needs. There’s a good amount of analytics in the solution to help us understand and use the data. Previously, we would have only had access to logs. If you present too much data, it basically becomes no data at all.”
With a complete Proofpoint solution, Linebarger has established a culture of security to continually protect its clients—and strengthen its operations.
