Securing files to stop them being taken offsite

[Chopsy]

We have suffered a few problems recently with staff who have resigned or are about to resign emailing hundreds of our company files offsite.

I'd like to investigate the possibility of securing the files somehow so that they cannot be used out of our site. We run NetWare 4 for file servers and a mix of Win 95 / XP clients. Is there an easy way of doing this that doesn't create too much of an overhead or is too expensive? Ideally I'd like some kind of encryption that would be transparent on all my client machines, but unreadable on an external system unless they were given a one-time key.

Any suggestions or experiences?

 

[Sapient2003]

Look into BestCrypt, Magic Folders, Encrypted Magic Folders, PGP, Folder Guard, etc. --Sapient2003 - sapient@sapient2003.com
"The worst insecurity is beleiving you are too secure."

 

[chiph]

Chopsy -

If your users have read access, they have copy access.

Your best bet would be to revoke their access as soon as they're laid off or let-go.

Chip H.

 

[pansophic]

Chopsy,

You're looking for a technical solution to a procedural problem. While this is possible in some cases, it frequently is not. If this person has legitimate access to the document(s), then you will not be able to stop them from copying and forwarding this information on to a third party through technical means. They can even do it by printing the documents and then carrying or mailing them to a third party, they don't have to email them. Encryption can not stop a legitimate user from using the material in an undesireable way.

I hope that your company has a written policy dictating when and how documents may be distributed outside the organization. And employees should be required to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Your logs of their email transactions should indicate which documents were forwarded and to whom. With policies and non-disclosure agreements, you can sue both the former employee and their hiring company (if that is where the information was sent). This will discourage the practice in the future, and is commonly used by sales organizations to keep sales people from moving to a competitor with a rolodex full of clients.
pansophic

 

[Chopsy]

We do have non-disclosure agreements and policies that cover this, but unfortunately in practice our company won't sue, and we generally don't stop peoples access when they resign (they're almost always required to work their notice) Even if we did, people would just email out the files before handing in their notice.

I agree that I'm trying to find a technical solution to a problem that could be solved in other ways, but at the moment, it's my only avenue!

Although people could still print out documents and physically take them offsite, it's nowhere near as easy as just emailing everything.