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GCN Home > 09/18/06 issue

Fighting the enemy within

Workshare Protect keeps good people from doing bad things with agency data

By John Breeden II, GCN Staff

Sometimes keeping data safe is a bit like a cartoon in which the hapless character boards up all his windows and piles furniture against the doors only to find his nemesis standing behind him in the room.

Most network defenses are pointed toward the outside world and assume everything within the network is safe. During the Spanish Civil War, nationalist Gen. Emilio Mola was asked how he expected to besiege Madrid with only four columns of soldiers. He answered he had a secret fifth column of supporters within the city. There may not be subversive elements your agency, but the point is that most security breaches are accidental and come from the inside, and government IT shops need to address them.

The Workshare Protect Enterprise Suite is network security that looks at what’s going on inside a network to help stop both purposeful and accidental information leaks. In addition, it can educate users when they’re violating policy so they learn from their mistakes and don’t send sensitive data outside the agency.

Installing the program is not difficult, though it requires a bit of sneaker work by the network admin. You need to install the software on your policy server first, then point each client back to the server for installation. After that, the clients will automatically contact the server at regular intervals to check for policy or program updates. You need about 50MB of free space on each client machine.

Highly restrictive

When first installed, the program’s default policy is highly restrictive. For example, you can’t send a Word document to an outside source. Administrators will need to delve into the program and configure it to match their individual security policies. Workshare can scan any document created with Microsoft Office, including Excel, Word and PowerPoint. It also works with Lotus Notes 6.0 or higher and, of course, with Microsoft Outlook.

The interface is easy to use and highly detailed. For example, you could allow the word “salary” within a Word document, but flag it if found inside a cell on an Excel spreadsheet. And because most federal agencies put classification levels in the header, you can set up policies based on the individual document type as defined by the header. Any file listed as top secret may have all routing possibilities disabled, for example, while lesser classified information might be sent to certain people but not outside the agency. This level of detail is surprisingly easy to configure, either from scratch or by modifying the default policy.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Software Applications, IT Security, Content / Record Management



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