Human errors remain the biggest cause of data loss in Brazil, where two-thirds of organizations attribute this damage to careless employees or outsourced service providers. But a study by the governance and cybersecurity company Proofpoint concludes that the adoption of it still brings new risks for companies in the country.
Among security professionals interviewed in the survey, 31% cite compromised users and 24% malicious employees as causes for losses. “With nearly two-thirds of data loss incidents in Brazil related to human behavior and AI introducing an entirely new layer of risk, security leaders can no longer afford to have fragmented defenses,” says Proofpoint country manager in Brazil, Marcos Nehme.
Half of the companies represented by security professionals in the survey cite data loss through generative artificial intelligence as one of their top concerns. According to Nehme, the pace of digital transformation and adoption of AI in Brazil is surpassing traditional security models.
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“The organizations that will succeed are those that treat data security as an adaptive discipline — one that evolves alongside the way people increasingly work, share and collaborate with machines,” he says. The Proofpoint survey says that 38% of companies are concerned about the use of sensitive data in AI training and 34% flag unsupervised access by AI agents as a critical threat.
AI is also security
If, on the one hand, the implementation of artificial intelligence generates fears, on the other hand it is an alternative found by companies to improve their solutions against leaks: two thirds of Brazilian organizations have already implemented data security resources enhanced by AI to classify data.
“Fragmented tools and limited visibility leave organizations exposed. The future of data protection depends on unified, AI-based solutions that understand content and context, adapt in real time, and protect information across human and agent activities,” says Proofpoint Chief Strategy Officer Ryan Kalember.
Behind fears about data loss is a growth in the amount of information stored and shared by companies. Among global companies with more than 10,000 employees, 41% manage more than a petabyte of data — the equivalent of a thousand terabytes. In Brazil, 44% of companies saw their data grow by 30% in the last year.
There is an imbalance in responsibility for data loss globally, according to Proofpoint’s global data, which shows that 1% of users are responsible for 76% of data loss events. Meanwhile, the frequency of data loss in Brazilian companies is an average of nine incidents annually, with records of up to several of them per month.
