Data Leaks: What You Don't Know Will Hurt You
How do you know employees aren't transmitting sensitive data off your network if you're not bothering to look? How one company found a technology answer that led managers to institute new training programs and other changes.
CIO — Back in 2004, something didn’t seem right within the sales group at WebEx, the software-as-a-service Web conferencing provider. Many sales executives worried that critical competitive information —such as WebEx pricing data —might be slipping out to WebEx’s competitors before the sales force could close deals with prospective customers.
“A deal would be made [with a potential customer] by one of our competitors, and the price was right below what we were going in at,” recalls Randy Barr, CSO at WebEx, which claims 64 percent of the Web conferencing market and hosts 50,000 conferences on an average day. (Barr’s responsibilities include both physical and information security.)
That concern prompted sales department executives to ask Barr and the CIO at the time to investigate the situation. After several days of investigating (interviewing sales reps, scanning network logs and searching through sent e-mails), Barr concluded that no information had been leaked.
However, the investigation and subsequent conversations with WebEx executives prompted all involved to wonder if there was a way that the company could actively monitor its internal networks, especially because all of WebEx’s tools are proprietary.
Barr says executives were looking for details on not just what happened yesterday on WebEx’s systems, but they wanted to understand and prevent what might happen today and tomorrow. Barr’s team revisited sensitive data-handling procedures and also set out to identify if any vendors could help them improve the gatekeeping technology behind the processes.
In Search of Safeguards
Though Barr felt confident there was no systematic data leak problem, the discussions and investigative process gave him reason for unease. “I didn’t feel confident where all the information was coming out of our network,” he says. He was also concerned that it was “taking us such a long time to investigate the request,” he says. Depending on the request, investigations such as the sales team one could take half a day to a couple of days —and he wanted to speed that process up. In addition, Barr worried about not only tracking WebEx documents that he knew existed but the “documents that we don’t know exist.”
Barr isn’t alone. During the past three years, spectacular data-handling transgressions and subsequent compliance and regulatory mandates have lit a fire under CIOs and CISOs to protect their digital borders —from both insider threats and outside malcontents. In addition, there’s been a big push to safeguard companies’ intellectual property, says Paul Proctor, a research VP at Gartner who tracks vendors in the content monitoring and filtering (CMF) and data loss prevention (DLP) market.
