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June 19, 2007
No More Email Data Leaks?
I don't often say this, but I really hope this new Tumbleweed feature in their MailGate 3.5 product doesn't work. Life will get much less interesting if people can't email inside stuff.The new MailGate capabilities extend data leak and content filtering functionality to enforce multiple policy actions on messages containing sensitive information based on user context, corporate rules and delivery methods like encryption. This new functionality goes beyond the limited reporting capabilities of other content filtering vendors, yet at a fraction of the complexity and cost. Through innovation of the user interface, the new MailGate automatically filters certain confidential information, including specific credit card, social security, and CUSIP (banking/trading) numbers with a simple checkbox, making the enforcement of policies surrounding this data a best practice. The interface also provides extensive lexicons of financial, healthcare and offensive terms, with flexible word-weighting for granular control over a wide range of regulated information. Additionally, MailGate’s content filters can scan all inbound and outbound messages, and more than 300 types of attachments, including binary and nested files.Fail, damn it. Fail.
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This product uses regular expression matching which is pretty unreliable to detect real confidential data. For example, it would be very difficult to detect that a specific document was sent out of the enterprise unless they were looking for something specific to that document like the word "Confidential". A potential leaker can always just use their web mail account or copy the files to a USB drive and email it from home.
While I agree in general with your sentiment, this type of product can be very helpful for financial institutions to prevent people from inadvertently exposing personal information.
On the other hand, they (probably) won't be able to filter gmail.