When "Please Delete That Email" Isn't Enough: The Real Cost of Accidental Data Sharing

Business users must share sensitive data to get their job done. For most organizations, all users have access to some sort of critical data that the organization intends to possess internally.

What happens when a user accidentally shares sensitive data outside of the organization? Humans make mistakes.  What can the IT Security team do if that user sends the data to the wrong recipient?

Most IT and security leaders believe they have a handle on where their sensitive data lives and who's sending it externally. You might assume it's primarily your HR team sending employee records, your finance team sharing contracts, or your healthcare staff transmitting patient information. So the logical approach seems to be: Deploy encryption only to those high-risk teams.

But here's the reality: You don't actually know what everyone in your organization is doing with data on any given day. Every single person in your organization is one wrong keystroke, one autocomplete mistake, one rushed moment away from accidentally sharing something they shouldn't.

The Current "Solution" Isn't Actually a Solution

A Data Protection Officer at a New York school district shared something with me recently: Approximately once every other week, he has to write up a lengthy incident report because a user sent an email with student data to the wrong recipient.

Their remediation tactic is to ask the recipient to delete the email.

That's it.

Consider another real example from my colleague's blog post, Summer Camp Mishap: How a Child's Medical Records Landed in My Inbox & How Virtru Could Have Helped: The camp nurse's office sent the wrong parent the entire medical history of a student. The parent notified the school. The Dean of Students simply asked her to delete the email.

Here's the problem there.

You have zero visibility. Did they actually delete it? Did they read it first? Did they forward it to anyone? Did they screenshot it? You'll never know.

You have zero control. Once that email leaves your environment, you're at the mercy of the recipient's goodwill and competence.

You still have full compliance burden. Depending on the data and regulations, you may still need to report this as a breach, even if the recipient promises they deleted it.

You're relying on hope. Hope isn't a security strategy.

What This Actually Costs You

Let's talk about the real financial impact of these recurring incidents, because the cost isn't just stress and lost sleep.

Time Spent on Incident Response

Let's do the math on that DPO writing incident reports every other week:

• Average incident report: 3-4 hours (investigation, documentation, notifications, follow-up)
• Frequency: 2x per month
• Annual time cost: 72-96 hours per year
• If that DPO's loaded cost is $75/hour: $5,400-$7,200 per year just in incident paperwork

And that's assuming only ONE person has been accidentally sharing data twice a month. For larger organizations, multiply that accordingly.

Potential Regulatory Penalties

The "please delete" method doesn't satisfy regulatory requirements when things go wrong.

• HIPAA breaches affecting 500+ individuals require public notification and OCR reporting
• Even smaller HIPAA incidents require documented risk assessments
• FERPA violations can result in loss of federal funding for educational institutions
• State breach notification laws have varying thresholds and requirements
• GLBA violations carry penalties up to $100,000 per violation

In industries where security is a differentiator (healthcare, financial services, legal) these incidents can damage your reputation with existing clients, cost you new business opportunities, complicate vendor security assessments, and make it harder to win contracts that require security attestations.

There’s Another Way

From my conversations with hundreds of IT leaders within Virtru's existing customer base, I've learned this: The only way to truly remediate accidental sensitive data sharing is when the data itself is tied to granular policy and access controls.

When a user makes a mistake, both the admin and/or the user should have the capability to revoke access to an email or file share.

When organizations apply encryption and rules across their entire domain using either Virtru for Outlook or Gmail, or the Virtru Data Protection Gateway (or both), the technology can automatically apply encryption and policy to the email BEFORE it leaves your environment.

How Domain-Wide Protection Works

The Virtru Data Protection Gateway sits server-side between your email server and the outside world, automatically applying encryption rules to outbound emails based on your policies—no user action required. You can trigger encryption based on content patterns (SSNs, patient IDs, keywords), sender department, recipient domain, or attachment type.

Alternatively, Virtru can be deployed to all users via enterprise licensing, integrating directly into Gmail or Outlook for end-to-end encryption. Many organizations deploy both for layered protection.

What this gives you:

• Revoke access instantly from the Virtru Control Center when mistakes happen, even after the email is sent
• Detailed audit trails showing who accessed what, when, and from where
• Automatic expiration dates for sensitive content
• Policies that prevent forwarding of protected emails
• Proof of containment for compliance reporting

Real example: Remember the camp nurse who sent a child’s PHI to the wrong parent? With Virtru, the Gateway would auto-encrypt the PHI, the school would see in the Control Center that it hadn't been opened yet, they'd revoke access immediately, and no breach report would be needed.

With revocable encryption, many incidents wouldn't require reports at all because the exposure would be contained before any actual data breach occurred.

The "Insurance Policy" Argument

Some organizations might think: "Not everyone in our organization needs encryption daily. Why would we deploy domain-wide?"

Just because someone's job description doesn't include sending sensitive or critical information to external parties daily (like an HR or Finance team), that doesn't mean every user in your organization couldn't make a mistake and send out sensitive data that leads to an incident.

Think of domain-wide protection as an insurance policy.

Every user is a potential risk:

• The seller who has customer contact lists
• The accountant handling vendor payment information
• The ops manager with employee data
• The intern who gets handed a sensitive file to send

Any of them could make a mistake. Domain-wide coverage ensures that when they do, you have the controls to contain it.

Addressing the Cost Concern

Understandably, most customers believe that applying control and encryption across their domain would be cost prohibitive.

Let's reframe this.

What you could be spending now

• Incident response time: Over 100 days for the majority of commercial organizations
• Potential regulatory penalties: $10,000-$100,000+ per violation
• Opportunity cost of security team time: Difficult to quantify but significant
• Risk of reputation damage: Potentially millions in lost business

What domain-wide protection costs

For many organizations, domain-wide protection costs less than a single regulatory fine, less than the fully-loaded cost of a security team member, and significantly less than the reputational damage of a public data breach.

The ROI calculation:

• Reduced incident response time (fewer incidents escalate to breaches)
• Eliminated "please delete" incidents that still require documentation
• Reduced regulatory risk
• Security team time redirected to strategic initiatives
• Competitive advantage in security-conscious industries

Many of our customers have upgraded to our Domain-Wide Coverage Package for exactly these reasons. You can read their stories here: Domain-Wide Security for Peace of Mind: 6 Real-World Examples.

Stop Hoping and Start Controlling

The next time someone in your organization sends sensitive data to the wrong person, wouldn't you rather have real controls than a polite request?

Domain-wide encryption is ultimately about having options when things go wrong. It's about replacing "please delete that email" with "access revoked;" reducing incident reports from twice a month to twice a year. It's about sleeping better at night.

Ready to explore what domain-wide protection would look like for your organization? Contact us to discuss custom pricing and deployment options that fit your budget and your risk profile.