Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
This article is for OTC users who receive an error when sending communications or files containing certain kinds of content. These errors may occur in Teams, Email, OneDrive, and other systems or services as added over time.
These errors may look like:
”This message was blocked due to potentially harmful content.”
“Your email message conflicts with a policy in your organization. The message wasn’t delivered to all recipients.”
What is DLP?
Data loss prevention is a security solution that identifies and helps prevent unsafe or inappropriate sharing, transfer, or use of sensitive data. As the information security climate becomes ever more perilous, it is considered an industry best practice to have DLP in place to secure data, and some organizations, government organizations in particular, may require DLP enforcement in their clients before allowing their system to be accessed.
OTC’s DLP Policy
At OTC, we have DLP Policies in place to prevent the transfer of certain kinds of sensitive information, such as Social Security Numbers and ABA bank routing numbers. These policies may evolve and change over time based on current threat levels or information security events in the general information space. If you are receiving an error such as one of the examples above, something in your message has matched the rules that filters for this information, or is formatted in such a way that it appears to match one of the DLP filter rules.
These reply only to sending messages or documents containing sensitive information, but not for receiving.
How Do I Communicate Sensitive Information?
Best Practice
The most secure way to share sensitive information at OTC is via OneDrive. You can share files with OTC or recipients outside the organization and either way they will need to authenticate to access the files or folders.
If this is a user you’ll be sharing a lot of sensitive information with, or it’s a certain type of file you want to control access to, you might want to create a dedicated folder to keep the files in. Right click your folder or file, and click Share
Fill in your recipient’s email. You can click the pencil to edit what access they have, include a message if you like, and then hit Send:
That’s all you have to do!
Your recipient will get an email that looks like this:
This sends them to Onedrive via Sharepoint to login. They’ll have to supply their email address, and then Microsoft will send them a multi-factor authentication email (with a code) to enter in lieu of a password.
Request an Exception
(Not Recommended)
Request an exception here.
If you need further assistance, contact the IT Help Desk.