Data Protection and Information Security
Not a day went by this past year (http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm#2007) when the lead headline was yet another Data Breach. Whether it was lost tapes by Iron Mountain, a dishonest insider, hacking, stolen notebook or information exposed on-line, data leakage should be on every Security Officers mind. One of the most important security functions today is protecting organizational secrets. We finally have entered a world where everything important is on a server or workstation somewhere in our organizations. Certainly we’re nowhere near paperless, but the really important stuff — including, in many cases, money or its simulacrum — lives happily in our systems as data bits and bytes. It also travels around — on our networks, in email, backup tapes, on thumb drives, on DVD/CDs, etc. How do we ensure that critical corporate data, intellectual property, private information and the like don’t grow wings and fly our nicely protected coop?
The short answer is that today we cannot offer that assurance. But we can close many of the escape routes effectively, and that is what this month’s data leakage prevention products intend to do. As long as there are USB ports and DVD writers on user machines there is a chance that data can leak out of the organization. And, as long as there are laptops that travel with employees, and VPNs so that employees can work remotely, there is the chance that something will escape that you would rather have stay inside the organization. But the tools we looked at make that escape a lot harder.
Another, and increasingly popular, term for what this month’s batch of products do is extrusion prevention. In a nutshell, these products attempt to stop unauthorized transfer of files or information based on a set of rules or policies. The tools come in three types: sniffers, gateways (sometimes called proxies), and client-side applets or agents. Each one performs a different set of extrusion prevention tasks.
Client-side agents sit on each user’s computer and apply the policies to all of the actions on the computer. Sniffers generally only notify an administrator that data is leaving the enterprise in violation of policy, along with the source of the leakage. Gateways, or proxies, both notify and stop if they are so configured.
Obviously, there are pros and cons to each of these. For example, agents may be able to stop such activities and save unauthorized data to a thumb drive. Sniffers may only be able to alert, but by that time the horse is out of the barn. Gateways present a single point of failure and/or a chokepoint in network traffic flow and may default to a fail open state, allowing unrestricted data flows in the event of a failure.
Sencilo can assist you with services from assessing weak areas, and then plug them with technology and offerings of Best Security Practices (BSP).
Protection Related Products:
