A few numbers from the latest research on the number of leaks committed, as well as a few additional ways to strengthen virtual data room protection.
The reasons and motives for compromising documents can be very different and can be committed by a wide variety of people. In their latest study, analysts have determined exactly who was involved in the 2020 document leaks and who bears the greatest responsibility for the breaches.
At the end of 2020, hackers are the leaders in leaks (60.5% of the total number of leaks per year). Compared to 2019, their share increased by 15%. Second place went to non-privileged employees – 33.7% who steal confidential documents for various reasons: revenge, resentment against management, sale for additional income, etc.
In addition, the percentages are divided between company directors (2.5%), contractors (2.3%) and former employees (0.8%).
In general, companies began to better control work with counterparties, which reduced the rate of leaks almost twice due to their fault, but nevertheless this channel still causes significant losses to organizations.
To make working with contractors more secure, companies use secure storage and secure document sharing, but these options do not guarantee 100% protection.
How Can The Level Of Protection Be Increased?
As an additional option, companies can implement VDR with more expensive data room costs. These are virtual data rooms, rooms for working with documents on the principle of Google.Drive or Yandex.Disk. You can upload important documents and open different levels of access to them.
Mostly all virtual data rooms have the same functionality: uploading documents, viewing, sharing within the workspace or with external users, downloading, sending for printing and restricting access rights.
Sometimes you will find additional features.
For example:
- adding watermarks (watermarks);
- the most common option for protecting sensitive documents.
Pros: quick to add, customizable, anti-theft.
Disadvantages: easy to erase, sometimes very limited reading of information and overlapping of important points, spoils the general appearance of the document, no legal protection, gradually losing popularity.
Protective Nets
Accessibility features to limit the viewing area of a document, allowing you to protect it from unauthorized photography or reading.
Advantages: activated automatically in the system and do not allow, for example, a person passing by to read or take a picture of a confidential document or take a screen capture.
Disadvantages: they significantly interfere with reading the document, cause inconvenience to users and work only at the moment of viewing the document “here and now”.
Invisible Mark
The process consists of marking all documents that pass through the data room with invisible markers that, in the event of a leak, allow an investigation and identify the culprit of the leak.
Pros: The labels are invisible, they cannot be deleted or removed in the editor, they can be used to create millions of unique copies of a single document, in the event of a leak, these labels can be used to investigate and identify the owner of the compromised copy.
Cons: The technology has not yet become widely popular due to the small number of companies offering it. Some points need improvement.
More on Marking
The technology works in such a way that digital steganographic changes are made at the document level, which allows you to create thousands of copies of the same original document without any visual distortion for the user.
If someone decides to download a document from the data room, take a picture and put it online, or just take a picture of the screen with confidential information open, you can use the forensic module built into such unique VDRs to find out the culprit of the leaks.