Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Monitor Documents?
JumpDrive writes "I have been presented with a problem recently, which I know others have probably faced. During the last month, one of our customers accused us of providing another customer with their specification. So the question arose: how do we, or can we trace documents and find if they are being opened or used somewhere where they weren't intended. We don't want to be restrictive, because at times, we have people all over the place, but if one of our documents were opened in a foreign country, that would arouse suspicions. Most of our documents are made with MS office suite, and I have been thinking of working on a macro to ping a server, but that would require the user to enable the macros, and it would also require the insertion into about 1000 documents. But it's been difficult for me to find a solution that doesn't prevent someone in Omaha from opening a document for legitimate use and is not a solution that can easily be disabled or hacked around."
You have completely missed the point of Ask Slashdot. It's just not about doing a 5 minute search and randomly choosing one. The reason people ask this group questions like this is because they want more detailed information from people who have hopefully had hands on experience doing these things. What worked? What didn't? Why did it, or did not work? How was implemented? You may not be able to find that kind of information easily even if you know what to search for. And once you have that information, there are other people to give their insights on what that persons stories. It has the potential to be one big chain of helpfulness.
Sure, it's a cheap and lazy way of getting someone else to do some of your work for you, but it's not generally a bad thing. I know if I was completely clueless about some tech related problem, I'd probably ask here. Wouldn't you?
That is the simple answer.
If you want to give something to someone, you can't control what they do with it. That is like saying "I want to give this hammer to a friend, but I want to prevent them from loaning it to someone else, or using it to smash computers with."
If you don't trust the person that you give something, then the chain of trust is broken. Everything we do is based on trust. I trust if I give you an emergency key to my house that you won't rob me. I trust that when I accept cash from you to pay for a service that it isn't counterfeit. I trust when you sign a contract with me, you will live up to your duties in the contract. I trust when you babysit my children you won't rape them. You pretty much asked for exactly what the whole point (and failure) of DRM is all about- trying to FORCE *everyone* to trust and comply with your wishes. You can't. Welcome to humanity.
No, you can't. If you want people to be able to read it, they can copy it. You can make it more cumbersome but nothing can prevent screenshots. You can waste a lot of time and money, but the best you will achieve is being able to say "we tried". Because you cannot succeed. You can't distribute a document and at the same time expect it to remain secret.
The problem is: How can you prevent users with job responsibilities that require them to have access to the data for client A from sharing that (directly or indirectly) with client B. There really isn't a good way to do this, since in the worst case, the user can manually copy the material onto paper or take a picture with their cellphone.
Your best approach is a group of mitigation procedures that make it difficult for information to be intercepted between you and client A, and at least provide audit trail capability for users accessing confidential information.
The bad news is that you probably have no way to win client A's trust back. They've already made the accusation, and since you didn't have any pre-existing mechanism in place to monitor and prevent, you can't investigate their claims effectively. Also, if it turns out that employees of your company shared this information as a short-cut for supporting client B, you're really screwed in terms of legal responsibility and employee ethics. You'd have to fire both the source and the recipient in the data share, just for starters.
For the future: keep confidential documents in an encrypted content-management repository with user access and rights controls that can support segregation of groups, projects and so on. Have all your clients encrypt their data with your company's public key so that there is no MITM risk for items they are sending to you over the net (or Fedex for that matter). Institute a training program that emphasizes the segregation of projects for different clients (especially competitors) unless you are developing a project that is explicitly designed and marketed as a shared or commercial offering. And institute a security policy for your employees and contractors that identifies penalties including termination of employment, civil and criminal liability if data confidentiality policies are violated. You should probably also have a project "non-compete" clause where one person cannot work on projects for competing customers within 6 months of each other (or whatever timeframe is reasonable).
You may also want to look at the physical security of your facilities. If your people are leaving confidential documents in unlocked cabinets or leaving their PCs logged in, anyone with access to the office area (visitors, delivery people, cleaning service) could have taken the information.
We are the 198 proof..