Nightfall’s Spring 2025 Product Launch Brings DLP to the AI Era

The rapid adoption of AI, particularly generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, presents both immense productivity opportunities and significant data security challenges for organizations. While employees increasingly leverage AI for various business functions, this widespread use often occurs outside sanctioned channels, creating what's known as shadow AI. This unsanctioned usage, coupled with the fact that even sanctioned tools are frequently accessed via non-corporate accounts, significantly elevates the risk of sensitive data exposure.

At Nightfall, we’re constantly taking on the challenge of securing sensitive data when using gen AI platforms. Securing data in gen AI is an essential pillar of data loss prevention (DLP), and that’s why we built our entire Spring 2025 Product Launch around helping organizations use gen AI in safer and smarter ways.

Our AI-native solutions deliver comprehensive coverage across the primary data exfiltration vectors:

1. Endpoints: Lightweight agents for macOS and Windows monitor activity without disrupting user workflows.
2. Browsers: Plugins for Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox provide deep visibility and control over web-based interactions, including AI applications.
3. SaaS Applications: API-based integrations monitor and protect data within sanctioned apps like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Zendesk.
4. Email: Inline monitoring for Gmail and Exchange Online scans outgoing emails and attachments in milliseconds, allowing for automatic blocking, quarantining, or encryption.
5. Generative AI: Specific capabilities target the unique risks associated with AI tools, preventing sensitive data from entering prompts or being uploaded.

Nightfall's Approach: Enabling Secure AI Adoption

Security teams face a dilemma: block AI adoption and stifle innovation, or permit unrestricted access and accept substantial data security risks. A more nuanced approach is required – one that enables productivity while implementing robust controls.

Nightfall offers an AI-powered DLP platform designed to address these modern data exfiltration challenges head-on. Our approach focuses on enabling secure AI adoption rather than simply blocking it. Sathe stated Nightfall’s goal clearly as to "provide controls to organizations so that they can properly assess how AI applications are being used without stunting productivity."

As Nightfall co-founder Rohan Sathe noted in our product launch webinar in late April, "We’re seeing massive amounts of data that continues to flow from corporate environments to generative AI solutions, and that potentially exposes sensitive data. This sensitive data can be a mixture of IP: customer PII, competitive data, or personal employee data. It all results in many different governance gaps."

Key Capabilities for Securing AI Interactions

Nightfall's platform introduces specific functionalities to combat data leakage into shadow AI and gen AI tools:

• Monitoring sensitive data in prompts: Continuous, seamless monitoring detects and prevents sensitive information (like source code, credentials, or PII) from being pasted or typed into AI prompts. Anant Mahajan, Head of Product at Nightfall, highlights this by saying, "Nightfall automatically detects and prevents exposure of content within prompts." In cases where sensitive data like credentials are detected, the platform can automatically block the transfer and offer immediate options for remediation to end users and security teams.
• Blocking risky file uploads with data lineage: Understanding the origin of data is crucial. Nightfall utilizes data lineage to identify files originating from high-value corporate sources (e.g., Google Drive, Zendesk) and blocks their upload to unsanctioned AI tools. "The combination of data lineage and AI-based content classification is what makes the detection much more accurate,” Sathe said. “The nuance is in where the content originated, and the classification allows us to provide highly accurate detection."‍
• Contextual policy enforcement and employee education: Policies are not one-size-fits-all. Nightfall allows for granular, adaptive policies based on data lineage, content sensitivity, user roles, and upload/download destination. Admins can choose automated actions like blocking or redaction. Our human firewall provides real-time feedback to employees when they attempt risky actions, for education and further context on the dangers of sharing sensitive data.‍
• Preventing copy-paste exfiltration: Nightfall monitors clipboard activity, preventing sensitive content copied from corporate applications (like Zendesk tickets containing customer PII) from being pasted into AI applications accessed via the browser. In our Product Launch webinar, Mahajan demonstrated how the Nightfall is able to inspect the content of the clipboard to identify and block credit card data from being uploaded into Perplexity.

Where Holistic Coverage Meets Accurate Detection

"We are an AI-powered DLP platform that helps organizations prevent data leaks and stop data exfiltration across all the major exfiltration vectors,” Mahajan said. By integrating endpoint agents, browser plugins, and API connections, Nightfall provides holistic visibility. This telemetry, combined with advanced AI-driven content classification and data lineage tracking, ensures highly accurate detection with minimal false positives.

The platform is designed for flexibility and scale, covering not just listed AI sites but any application accessed via endpoints or browsers.

As organizations continue to embrace AI, implementing a robust, AI-aware DLP strategy is no longer optional, but essential. Nightfall provides the necessary controls to secure sensitive data across all potential exfiltration points, enabling businesses to innovate confidently.

No matter where you are on your gen AI adoption journey, security must be a top priority. Ask us how Nightfall can help protect all your organization’s essential information or schedule a demo with us to see Nightfall in action.