Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

DLP systems have traditionally relied on regex pattern matching to identify sensitive information. While regex excels at finding patterns, it fundamentally can’t understand context. It’s a massive limitation that forces security teams into endless cycles of tuning expressions and triaging false positives. Nightfall AI built prompt-based entity detection to solve this problem.

Legacy DLP operates on a fundamental constraint: it identifies sensitive data by matching patterns. Credit card numbers follow the Luhn algorithm. Social Security numbers conform to a nine-digit format. API keys match specific string patterns. This approach works for structured data, but it fails to address a critical reality: Your most sensitive assets aren't numbers. They're documents.

The security landscape is shifting. For the past two years, security teams have focused primarily on what users type into chatbots by monitoring interactions with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. But a new risk vector is emerging, one that operates largely outside traditional security controls: AI agents accessing corporate data autonomously through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

In May 2025, Coinbase disclosed a data breach that exposed nearly 70,000 customer records—not through a sophisticated external attack, but through bribed customer service agents. The cryptocurrency exchange refused a $20 million ransom demand and instead pledged that amount toward catching those responsible. One arrest has been made in India, but the incident highlights a fundamental problem in modern security: your people can become your greatest vulnerability.

The security landscape has shifted dramatically. Employees now work across dozens of applications, browsers, and devices—often using personal accounts alongside corporate ones. They're adopting generative AI tools at unprecedented rates, and your source code is moving between repositories faster than traditional DLP tools can detect. This creates a fundamental problem: how do you enable productive work while preventing corporate IP from leaving your trusted environment?