Saturday 29 September 2007

MacUser covers data disasters and information leak prevention

The recent MacUser edition (14th September) has got a great article about potential data disasters from hidden data and emails. And guess what? 3BView gets a mention as we are the only metadata removal tool for Macs (as far as I’m aware).

The article doesn’t appear to be online yet, but MacUser’s site is here.

Tuesday 25 September 2007

The financial view of ILP

Just a quick mention of my colleague Ges Ray, who’s also blogging on information leak prevention – in his case, on the financial technology site Finextra.

Ges’s blog has some interesting points, and the whole site is good reading for anyone interested in the financial sector.

Wednesday 19 September 2007

Leaked emails reveal company’s secrets

Controversial P2P “mitigation” company MediaDefender has got itself into trouble when 700MB of internal emails were distributed on the Internet this weekend. It appears that an employee had forwarded all of his emails to a Gmail account, which has then been accessed by someone else.

According to this report, the emails gave away many secrets about the company’s operation, including evidence that MediaDefender had intentionally misled the outside world about some of its activities. The emails apparently also included financial details including salaries, Social Security numbers and home addresses of some of the company’s employees.

It’s a point that everyone must be familiar with, but it bears repeating: email is a dangerous thing. And it’s not rocket science to realise that having controls to filter and monitor emails going outside your company can help avoid this kind of problem.

Sunday 9 September 2007

Stating the obvious: mobile mistakes are easy to make

It seems common sense to me that anyone using email out of the office is going to be more at risk of making silly mistakes. It may be late in the evening, they may be rushed as they’re concentrating on something else, or they may be using a mobile device that’s not as easy to use as their main office PC or laptop.

The business climate nowadays only encourages this, what with mobile working being so heavily encouraged, clients in different time zones and so on.

So it only seems logical that information leak prevention should cover users when they’re out and about. Doesn’t it?

It still surprises me that so much effort in ILP focuses on desktop tools, which by definition won’t cover remote working and PDAs, Blackberrys etc. The server seems the only sensible place to put the ILP protection.

I did get my assumptions backed up recently by some research from Nokia, which is always nice. This says three quarters of workers use mobile devices to email clients outside working hours, and paints a picture of them “writing their emails from locations including pubs, parties and taxis”. Scary stuff!