I. A “Compliant” Customer List That Walked Out the Door
During a quarterly audit, a city commercial bank discovered that a list containing high-net-worth customer names, account balances, and wealth management preferences had appeared in the hands of a competitor’s marketing team. The security department immediately launched an investigation, but the results were unexpected: the file had never been sent out via email, the DLP system had generated no alerts, there was no abnormal traffic in the firewall logs, and there was no copying behavior in the USB control records. The file had passed through normal business approval processes and been legally shared with a “partner.”
The investigation lasted three weeks. The final tracing results showed: a relationship manager had shared the file with an internal colleague for “joint marketing,” the colleague synchronized it to a department shared directory, the shared directory was configured to be accessible to an external partner institution, and a departing employee of the partner institution downloaded the file before their permissions were revoked. Throughout the entire chain, every operation was authorized, and every node complied with the permission configuration at the time—but no single link was responsible for “where this file ultimately went.”
This is not an isolated case. In 2025, FinWise Bank in the United States faced multiple class-action lawsuits after a former employee illegally accessed customer data after departure, leading to the leak of 689,000 customer records. In the same year, a former assistant manager at Shanghai Commercial Savings Bank used their position to download large amounts of customer personal data, founded a company after leaving, and after failing to solicit business from their former employer using a proposal video made from the data, actually mailed large volumes of employee personal data in paper form to 66 branches of the bank. Throughout 2025, the banking industry ranked first among all industries for data leak risk for the third consecutive year, with the broad financial sector monopolizing four of the top five leak incidents.
These cases point to a long-overlooked fact: the primary source of data leaks in banks is often not external attacks, but the “normal operations” of internal personnel. From the moment a file is created, if it does not itself carry security attributes, then every transfer, every share, and every cross-department collaboration within the bank can become the starting point of a leak.
II. The Triple Dilemma of Internal File Outbound Transfers in Banks
Internal employee file outbound transfer management in banks faces unique challenges distinct from other industries.
- The first dilemma: The contradiction between high data value and high business efficiency. A bank’s core data—customer account information, credit materials, risk control models, investment banking project drafts, and wealth management sales records—has extremely high commercial value and regulatory sensitivity. But this data needs to flow frequently among relationship managers, risk control personnel, compliance departments, and management. If controls are too strict, business efficiency will be severely affected. A bank once found that its DLP policies were so strict that file transfers in the credit approval process were repeatedly blocked, forcing relationship managers to send files through personal WeChat to bypass controls.
- The second dilemma: The covert nature of insider threats. Unlike external attacks, internal personnel’s file outbound behavior is often cloaked in the guise of “business needs.” A relationship manager sending a customer list to a partner institution may be for business collaboration needs; a risk control staff member taking credit materials home to work overtime may be due to work pressure; an investment banking staff member sharing project drafts with a law firm may be for compliance requirements. These behaviors are reasonable in business terms, and security teams find it difficult to control them with a simple “prohibit” or “allow” approach.
- The third dilemma: The rigid constraints of compliance requirements. The “Notice of the People’s Bank of China on Doing a Good Job in Personal Financial Information Protection for Banking Financial Institutions” (Yin Fa [2011] No. 17) explicitly requires banking financial institutions to take effective measures to strengthen personal financial information protection and prevent information leaks and abuse. At the same time, the Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law, Personal Information Protection Law, Commercial Bank Law, and other laws and regulations impose multi-layered requirements on bank data security. Banks not only need to prevent data leaks but also need to provide a complete evidence chain when leaks occur to meet regulatory accountability requirements.
III. Why Traditional Solutions Cannot Control “Insiders”
Faced with internal file outbound risks, most banks have adopted measures including: deploying DLP to inspect outbound content, controlling file exits through approval processes, and controlling channels such as USB and email. These measures are highly effective against external attacks but frequently fail against internal personnel.
Failure One: Channel control cannot cover “internal circulation.” DLP manages the email channel, USB control manages the peripheral channel, and cloud drive auditing manages the cloud drive channel. But the main path for internal personnel data leaks is often not these channels, but rather department shared directories, internal collaboration platforms, and file sharing in instant messaging tools. These “internal channels” are usually not within the scope of control in traditional DLP solutions because their business justification is too strong.
Failure Two: Content identification cannot perceive file attributes. An email can carry a public product brochure or an Excel file containing customer account information. If the DLP policy only looks at the recipient domain and attachment size, it cannot distinguish between these two cases. But in a multi-system architecture, the content identification engine exists only in the DLP system. The endpoint security system does not know whether a file is sensitive, and the encryption system does not know which channel the file is being transmitted through.
Failure Three: Files lose control after leaving the control boundary. After a file is approved for outbound transfer, the mission of traditional control ends. Whether the file is forwarded, downloaded, screenshotted, or continues to circulate in an external environment—the control system has no way of knowing. And when a leak incident occurs, the security team needs to spend weeks piecing together logs from multiple systems, often still unable to reconstruct the complete flow trajectory.
IV. Ping64: Data-Centric Integrated Control
The core breakthrough of the Ping64 integrated office security platform is: it does not add more channel control tools, but shifts the anchor of control from channels to the data itself. From the moment data is created, it carries complete security attributes. No matter which channel it travels through, how many intermediate nodes it passes, or how many locations it is copied to, these attributes always accompany it.
The concrete implementation of this logic in bank internal file outbound scenarios is reflected in the collaboration of capabilities at four levels.
1. Making Sensitive Data “Protected from Creation”
The starting point of bank file outbound control is not the outbound stage, but data creation. Ping64’s content identification engine comes with preset data identification rules common in the financial industry, capable of identifying structured data such as customer fund account numbers, ID numbers, mobile phone numbers, and bank card numbers, while also supporting identification of key information such as “customer list,” “undisclosed,” “credit materials,” and “investment banking projects.” When a file is created or saved in a controlled application, the system automatically determines its sensitivity level and triggers corresponding protection actions.
On the endpoint side, transparent document encryption sinks encryption and decryption logic down to the operating system kernel layer. When authorized processes read or write specified file types, encryption and decryption are completed automatically, while unauthorized processes always receive ciphertext. This means that even if a file containing customer information is copied to an unauthorized location, synchronized to a personal cloud drive, or transmitted through an uncontrolled channel, the file content remains under encryption protection. Ping64 supports deep compatibility with office software and business systems commonly used by banks, and will not cause lag or file corruption in daily business operations such as credit approval and risk control analysis due to encryption.
2. Giving Every Outbound Transfer “Full Context”
The key to bank file outbound control is enabling approvers to make judgments based on complete information, rather than guessing “whether this file can be sent” based solely on a file name.
Ping64 deeply links the approval process with content identification, endpoint status, and recipient identity. When an employee initiates a file outbound request, the system automatically performs a content compliance check, identifies the file’s sensitivity level, and triggers the corresponding approval process based on the bank’s preset policies. In the approval interface, approvers can see not only the file name and application reason, but also contextual information such as file content summary, sensitivity level, applicant’s endpoint compliance status, historical outbound records, recipient identity, and historical cooperation records.
More importantly, Ping64 supports integration with the bank’s existing comprehensive service management platform approval processes, utilizing the bank’s existing approval workflows to achieve online approval for plaintext file outbound transfers, facilitating approval operations for bank leadership while also supporting mobile approval business scenarios. This means banks do not need to build a separate approval system for file outbound control, but instead embed security control capabilities into existing approval workflows, reducing O&M pressure while improving control efficiency.
After approval, the system automatically processes the outbound file: adding tracing watermarks, setting validity periods, limiting the number of openings, and embedding tracing identifiers. When an outbound file is leaked, the bank can quickly locate the source of the leak and the responsible party through watermark information.
3. Making Cross-Network Flow “Secure and Controllable”
A bank’s network architecture typically includes multiple security domains such as the office network, production network, test network, and external connection zone, and data flow between different network zones requires strict control. Ping64 establishes secure transit zones between different network zones, and files are transmitted through controlled ferry mechanisms. During the ferry process, files remain encrypted, and the transmission channel uses encrypted protocols, ensuring that files are not stolen or tampered with during transmission.
For file exchanges with external partner institutions, Ping64 supports controlled outbound formats: files are transmitted in encrypted form, and the recipient needs to open them in a specified environment. Upon opening, it automatically connects to the verification server for identity verification and permission checks. Files cannot be forwarded, copied, or saved as other formats, ensuring the secure flow of core data in the supply chain.
4. Making Leak Tracing “From Having Logs to Having Evidence”
Investigations of bank data leak incidents often face a common dilemma: the bank can confirm that “data was leaked,” but cannot answer “who took the data out, at what time, and through what method.”
Ping64’s leak tracing capability restores outbound behavior into traceable, filterable, and reviewable audit events. The system automatically, in real time, and around the clock records every step of file actions on endpoint computers—local creation, modification, deletion, renaming, as well as operational behaviors such as USB copying, cloud drive uploads, instant messaging outbound transfers, email outbound transfers, and printing. After integrating sensitive content identification, the system automatically filters out sensitive incidents involving core secrets from massive logs, labels flow logs as “sensitive” and highlights warnings.
When a security officer discovers that a sensitive file has been abnormally sent out, they only need to select that record and click “Trace Flow Trajectory.” The system will then use that file as the core node to automatically generate a visualized panoramic map of file flow, presenting the complete chain from creation, modification, and renaming to multi-channel outbound transfer. Administrators can enter a file fingerprint or user account to simultaneously retrieve all relevant records for that file or person—storage location, outbound records, approval records, tracing identifiers, and screen recordings—without switching between multiple systems.
V. Integrated Advantages in Banking Scenarios
Integrating content identification, endpoint encryption, channel control, approval processes, and tracing identifiers on the same platform provides governance value in banking scenarios through three “eliminations.”
- Eliminating compliance blind spots. Banks need to simultaneously satisfy multi-layered regulatory requirements from the People’s Bank of China, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Secrecy Bureau, as well as laws and regulations such as the Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law, and Personal Information Protection Law. In a multi-system architecture, each system can only cover a fragment of compliance requirements, and the security team needs to spend a great deal of time piecing together evidence and verifying policies. Ping64’s unified audit center stores endpoint behavior audits, file outbound records, and approval process logs in association, forming a complete, coherent, and tamper-proof evidence chain. Administrators can enter a file fingerprint or user account to simultaneously retrieve all relevant records for that file or person, without switching between multiple systems.
- Eliminating collaboration barriers. Banking business is highly dependent on external collaboration. Law firms, accounting firms, appraisal institutions, and partner institutions need to receive and process data within a compliant framework. Ping64 supports controlled outbound formats: files are transmitted in encrypted form, and the recipient needs to open them in a specified environment. Upon opening, it automatically connects to the verification server for identity verification and permission checks. Files cannot be forwarded, copied, or saved as other formats, ensuring the secure flow of core data in the supply chain. This mechanism both satisfies collaboration needs and ensures controllability of data in external environments.
- Eliminating response delays. When the DLP module identifies that sensitive data is being sent out, the system can automatically trigger the file transfer control module to block the current operation, simultaneously start screen recording to capture the on-site scene, and notify administrators for manual review. When the endpoint security status changes, transfer permissions are automatically adjusted. This cross-module automated linkage compresses the time window from “discovering risk” to “controlling risk” to near-synchronous levels.
VI. From “Blocking” to “Managing”
The maturity of bank file outbound leak prevention construction can be divided into three stages.
The first stage is “blocking channels.” Banks disable USB, block personal cloud drives, and limit email attachment sizes, attempting to eliminate data leak risks through blocking. The result is that employees take photos with phones and send files via personal WeChat, forming more covert dark channels. A bank relationship manager once had an email blocked by DLP policies and instead sent a customer list to a partner institution through personal WeChat. The security team only discovered the blind spot in the control system after the incident occurred.
The second stage is “managing channels.” Banks deploy control tools on each channel—email DLP, USB control, cloud drive auditing, browser upload interception. Control coverage expands, but multiple systems each act on their own, and problems of policy conflicts, data fragmentation, and delayed response remain. A bank simultaneously deployed four security systems, and the security team needed to log into four consoles every day to handle alerts, creating a heavy O&M burden.
The third stage is “managing data.” Banks shift the control anchor from channels to the data itself. From the moment of creation, data carries protection attributes, and no matter which channel it travels through, the protection attributes always accompany it. Channel control becomes the execution means of data control, rather than an independent security objective.
What the Ping64 integrated office security platform pursues is precisely the goal of the third stage. When file outbound leak prevention operates collaboratively with content identification, endpoint security management, transparent document encryption, and unified identity management on the same platform, banks no longer need to deploy control tools separately for each new channel, nor do they need to make an either-or choice between “security” and “efficiency.”
Conclusion
The banking industry has ranked first among all industries for data leak risk for three consecutive years, and internal personnel’s data outbound behavior is the primary source of this risk. Traditional security solutions manage channels, but the true risk of data leaks lies in the data itself—its sensitivity level, encryption status, circulation permissions, and tracing identifier—which has no continuity when flowing across channels.
What the Ping64 integrated office security platform provides for bank file outbound leak prevention is precisely such a data-centric governance logic: keeping every piece of data protected from the moment it is created, making every flow traceable, keeping every outbound transfer controllable, and enabling every security investigation to obtain a complete evidence chain. In an era where bank data security regulation continues to escalate and insider threats become increasingly complex, this may be the most pragmatic protection for banks’ core data assets.
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