And I'm talking about anti-data-leakage programs

Sep 12, 2007 08:47 GMT  ·  By

Sure, it's great to deploy all sorts of programs on your machine/s in order to enforce security; but in some cases, one tool can be pretty much useless. Not completely, but it won't do the thing that you really need. And this is really true when talking about ant-data-leakage programs.

What do you expect them to do most? Well, to prevent hackers from accessing a certain database to steal sensitive info, of course! And secondly? To prevent users from doing stupid things that might cause data leaks. To be honest with you, a hacker with the right skills can get whatever data he wants from your database if he can access it. Think about it this way - if he managed to bypass the security parameter, the unified threat management, the firewalls, the "whatever" and still remain undetected, then how hard can it be for him to snatch some data? Not very hard?obviously!

When you deploy such software, it will eventually "see" that there is a data leak, no matter who caused it, though most of the times it's some clumsy employee's fault. As I've seen on NetworkWorld, analyst with the 415 group Nick Selby stated that most data-leakage products can't discover the activity of skilled insiders looking to steal. You don't have to be a computer guru to know that is severe.

Keeping data secure and, as a matter of fact, keeping a network secure is really hard work, and when users are not well trained, nasty things can happen, no matter how much IT managers strive. What they need is a kind of program similar to an annoying firewall, that whenever sees data going out in a rather dubious way, would ask the user "Hey, are you SURE you want to do that? You might cause a data leak!"

And because of things being the way they are, companies really need to think of data-breach aftermath. And here's a material on that.