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Customer names. Emails. Addresses. Phone numbers.
They may sound harmless compared to credit card or Social Security numbers, but they’re exactly what attackers use to launch phishing, credential stuffing, and fraud at scale.
Increasingly, they’re being stolen not from you by way of your vendors.
- Pandora: A Salesforce breach leaked customer names and emails.
- Chanel: A third-party cloud platform exposed U.S. client care records, including mailing addresses and phone numbers.
- Snowflake: Hackers hit one vendor and compromised 160+ companies, from AT&T to Santander to Ticketmaster.
These aren’t outliers. According to Verizon, third-party breaches doubled last year, rising from 15% to 30% of all incidents. PYMTS quoted Philip Yannella saying, “Lawsuits are surging too, up from 400 in 2021 to over 2,000 last year”.
The message is clear: vendor breaches are inevitable.
But your exposure doesn’t have to be.
Why Traditional Defenses Fall Short
SOC 2 audits, vendor questionnaires, business associate agreements (BAAs), data processing agreements (DPAs), data sharing agreements (DSAs), and annual reviews can’t keep up with the speed of today’s digital supply chains.
Every API, every outsourced IT provider, every cloud tool expands your attack surface. When those vendors become custodians of your customer data, their breach becomes your headline.
That’s why, in addition to asking, “How do we stop vendors from being breached?”, organizations should also be asking,
“How do we stop vendor breaches from exposing us?”
End to End, Protected Data Workflows
The real vulnerability is the way data is shared and stored.
Traditionally, organizations hand clear text or pseudonymized identifiers such as names, emails, and addresses, to third parties so they can process or link them.
That handoff is one of the areas attackers keep exploiting.
Karlsgate changes the model.
The Karlsgate Identity Exchange (KIE) makes data collaboration possible without ever sharing identifiers in the first place.
- No identifiers leave your custody. Vendors never receive names, emails, addresses, or other identifiers for matching purposes.
- No data exhaust to store or steal. Every transaction uses fresh cryptographic keys and random salts and a neutral facilitator for remote matching.
- Zero trust required. Even the neutral facilitator cannot re-identify your data since it is blind to the salts and keys.
- Automated and resilient. Secure-by-design processes reduce the chance of human error.
For data that does need to live inside shared platforms like Salesforce, Snowflake, or other production environments, Karlsgate extends protection with self-sovereign de-identification. Identifiers are automatically replaced with local cryptonyms that stay under your control. With this layer of protection added, even if a hacker gets inside those systems, there is nothing useful for them to steal.
With this dual approach, collaboration stays safe, and your core environments don’t become easy targets.
The Takeaway
As third-party breaches double and vendors become clear targets, there is a way to keep your data protected without slowing its use.
With Karlsgate, you can collaborate, integrate, and analyze without ever exposing the data attackers are hunting.
- In motion: Collaborate and match data across partners without ever exposing identifiers.
- At rest: Keep production environments safe with self-sovereign de-identification. So even if attackers get inside, there’s nothing usable to steal.
Breaches may be inevitable.
About Karlsgate
Karlsgate provides privacy-first software that makes secure data collaboration simple to adopt and scale. Its patented cryptographic protocol allows partners to match records using personal information without sharing that information or moving sensitive data. Designed for real-world use, Karlsgate integrates easily into existing workflows and supports both current and post-quantum cryptographic algorithms to ensure long-term protection. Organizations use Karlsgate to reduce risk, protect data by default, and unlock its value across teams and partners without adding friction or compromising compliance.
