Hide or protect?

One of the fairly traditional ways of concealing information from the eye, for which it is not intended to be its banal wrapping in a "black box" which will be tucked into the farthest on a shelf in the hope that under a mountain of other stuff nobody is interested. Oddly enough, this method is popular today in the protection of electronic documents...

By thinking about how perfect modern system of information protection, I was prompted recently occurred an incident involving U.S. military agencies, important documents which were made public site WikiLeaks.org. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that "the consequences of disclosure of these documents may be difficult and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners. They can damage our relationships and reputation in this key part of the world. Now, intelligence data collection methods, as well as military tactics and techniques will be known to our competitors".

That is, as you can see, the situation is more than serious - and certainly the data that has flowed from the Pentagon, were well protected, which, however, did not save the U.S. military from the machinations of insiders. In this case, it seems, an insider who has passed a scandalous site secret documents, had acted out of lust does not receive compensation for them, but because of some ideological reasons. Apparently, it did not work so the policy of secrecy, well protect such information from those who are willing to sell it to foreign intelligence.

The main question is how could an active defense documents fail in this case is better than mere secrecy? Under the active protection here refers not simply limit access to documents, but also monitor the actions of employees (which is realized DLP-system), and even encrypted information. Obviously, each new level of protection all the more ideological fervor cools to an insider, especially a big credit for this belongs to the DLP-system - in fact, receiving the key, can retrieve secure cryptographic media. At the same time avoid DLP-system is not so easy - for it is not always a silent code, and the employee responsible for ensuring information security, which has all the powers to report on insider activity superiors. Of course, to ensure absolute protection against leaks of information to make just a Herculean effort, but certainly the number of utekshih documents on WikiLeaks would be much smaller.

Someone else's mistakes, we replace our own experience "to step on a rake", and a wise decision to learn from the mistakes of the Pentagon. Large-scale leakage of information, which ultimately will cost the U.S. government simply astronomical sum in dollars, allows anyone who underestimates the danger of leakage of information and the importance of utilizing DLP-systems, learn from someone else's bitter experience what can cause neglect of issues of information security . I think that after her many could learn and benefit from high-quality software products to protect their confidential information.