Due to the nature of SharePoint as a collaborative platform, users will sometimes need to share important information to external users. In these cases, the security of that information should be the top priority.
In most cases, you should try to block external sharing where possible. Only allow external sharing when there is a legitimate business requirement for it. Isolate all external sharing sites into a single site collection, to help give you more visibility and control over what is being shared externally.
Doing this will help you ensure that you don’t fall victim to privilege abuse or allow unknown third-parties to get their hands-on sensitive data. By sharing externally using separate site collections and educating your employees about the best practices of sharing content externally, you’ll be able to mitigate most of the associated risks.
1. Disable Anonymous Sharing
Often there may be times when your users want to share content quickly and anonymously. There are many ways for them to do this. Many organizations restrict attachments on email, so users will look to Dropbox, Google Drive and other methods of anonymous sharing. SharePoint also has this functionality.
Thankfully, you can disable the ability to share and edit files anonymously through SharePoint. This is recommended for a number of reasons, including limiting what your users can share without you seeing and being able to gather all required data sharing information in the event of a data breach investigation.
2. Monitor Changes Being Made to SharePoint
For many organizations, SharePoint works in the background, facilitating collaboration, and problems are only spotted when they manifest themselves in the form of a data breach or disruption.
You need to ensure that you are auditing and monitoring SharePoint changes to spot anything that could potentially lead to downtime or a data breach. If you can report on the state of your SharePoint environment, you’ll be in a better place to ensure that you are secure and compliant with regulatory standards.
You will need to pay particularly close attention to configuration changes, permission changes and user profile changes. (source)
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