Know who’s moving data, why it matters, and what to do about it
Insider risk isn’t always malicious, but it’s always expensive when it’s missed. Nightfall gives security teams the context to tell a careless mistake from a real threat, and the automation to stop the real ones before they become a breach.
Most insider risk tools flag the event. None of them tell you if it matters.
Insider risk shows up in two very different shapes, and legacy tools can’t tell them apart.
Corporate espionage
A deliberate, targeted movement of IP or customer data.
Departing or disgruntled employees
The highest-risk window in the employee lifecycle, often through channels nobody’s watching until it’s too late.
See the pattern. Miss the content.
They track intent signals but miss content entirely. They know someone did something unusual, not whether what they moved was actually sensitive.
See the data. Miss the pattern.
They flag a file without any sense of whether this user, this timing, or this destination is normal.
Neither gives SecOps a real answer. Both flood the queue with noise a small team can’t triage in time.
Behavior and content, correlated into one answer
Five capabilities that turn a flag into a decision. Select one to see how it works.
Risk scoring that combines behavior and content
Nightfall doesn’t just flag that a file moved. It scores the event against who moved it, their role, their prior behavior, and what was actually in the file, so a departing employee downloading routine reports looks nothing like the same employee downloading the entire customer database the week before their last day.
- Who
- Role
- Prior behavior
- File content
> lineage salesforce.com → export → ~/Downloads → usb:/Volumes/UNTITLED hops=3 user=d.kim
Full data lineage on every event
Trace a file from its origin to its destination, across every SaaS app, endpoint, and AI tool it touched along the way. When an investigation starts, you're not piecing together fragments from five different logs, you have the whole story already assembled.
- SaaS
- Endpoint
- AI tools
- Origin → destination
> lineage salesforce.com → export → ~/Downloads → usb:/Volumes/UNTITLED hops=3 user=d.kim
Real-time remediation, not just alerts
Block, redact, quarantine, or revoke access the moment risk crosses a threshold, across SaaS, endpoint, and browser. Insider risk tools that only alert leave the exposure live until a human gets to the queue.
- Block
- Redact
- Quarantine
- Revoke
> remediate threshold=CRITICAL action=BLOCK(usb_write) revoke=salesforce_export latency=0.4s
Human Firewall coaching
Most insider risk isn't malicious, it's an employee moving fast and cutting a corner. Contextual, in-the-moment coaching on Slack, Teams, or email turns that moment into a correction instead of an incident, with self-remediation options so employees can fix a violation themselves. Security awareness builds automatically, without adding friction to legitimate work.
- Contextual coaching
- Self-remediation
- Fewer tickets
> coach channel=slack user=a.patel msg="This share exposes PII externally. Revoke link?" self_remediated=true
Investigation-ready by default
Every event ships with who, their role, prior behavior, and full lineage attached. What used to take days of correlating logs across disconnected tools is available the moment an investigator opens the case.
- Who
- Role
- Prior behavior
- Lineage
> case id=IR-2291 assembled_in=0s sources=[salesforce, okta, endpoint, slack] evidence_items=14
Automate review of millions of events. Surface the risks that matter.
Two agents do the work a small SecOps team can’t: score every user, investigate the top of the list, and report only validated high-risk users, with evidence and a clear call on bad habit vs. bad intent.
Triage Agent
Scores every user with a probabilistic rules-based model. Watches where data goes (competitor domains, personal accounts and cloud sync, bulk uploads to file sharing, AI services, resume and job sites) and how it moves (downloaded then sent out, funneled to one destination, someone else’s data, off-hours, bursts vs. peers, new destination types).
Keeps noise down: sensitivity from scanned content, role from Okta, knows your everyday tools, tells scripts from people.
Investigator Agent
Uses an LLM and tools to investigate top-scoring users and reassess their risk. Is this unusual for them? What happened, in what order? What data, and whose? Was it really them, or automation? How does it compare with peers?
Bad habit or bad intent: separate ratings for risky habits and suspected malicious intent.
Report → Case
Only for validated high-risk users. Every report becomes a case: Needs Review → Closed (expected behavior or incorrect assessment) or Escalated to HR, legal, or the SOC. Evidence links to Forensic Search events, scoring breakdown, and Okta context. PDF case files for stakeholders.
Honest about gaps: each report lists what’s missing, next steps, and what would change the verdict. Route to Email, Slack, Teams, Jira, SIEM, SOAR; every review action logged.
Six things an insider risk answer needs
Every insider risk tool on the market is missing at least one of these. Most are missing three.
| Feature | Behavior analytics | Suite-bundled DLP | Lineage-first tracing | Lightweight insider risk | Risk-scoring suites | Nightfall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Classifies the content Knows what moved, not just that it moved |  | |||||
Broad detector coverage PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, documents, multilingual | | |||||
Works beyond one suite SaaS, endpoint, browser, AI tools | | | | | ||
Full data lineage Origin to destination, every hop | | | ||||
Transparent scoring Shows why a user scored the way they did | | |||||
Written investigation A full case with evidence, not per-alert summaries | |
Turn every flag into an answer
Behavior and content, correlated. Full lineage on every event. AI moves your data. Nightfall controls it.
- A 30-minute call
- Tailored to your stack
