Bruce Naylor: And you know these new solid state drives are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time and they can hold tremendous amount of data. It’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to fit one of those in your pocket and be able to do something as well. When we are looking to prevent data leakage in our business, what areas should we really concentrate on the most?
Kevin Hodak: One of the main areas as you just mentioned with the solid state drives and just kind of started off with the USB sticks and those have grown up to I think 128 gig or so. It is about the biggest one I’ve seen but even the removable hard drive. So I’ve got a USB hard drive sitting on my desk that has 300 gig and it costs me about a hundred bucks three months ago. I saw the same one for $75.00 last week and it will fit pretty conveniently into my short pocket or my pants pocket. There were terabyte ones sitting right next to it. I just didn’t need that much storage.
So that’s one of the biggest of concern is that endpoint that if somebody walks into an organization either as an employee or maybe a guest or a contractor and puts some connective device to a machine it’s very easy for them to remove data. At GFI we offer a product, GFI EndPoint Security that really helps organizations combat that threat and it can work a couple of different ways.
The software allows you to deploy agents to each machine and those agents have customized policies that say on that particular machine these certain sets of users have particular permissions so maybe some of your users can’t access USB memory sticks at all because it’s not something they need for part of their business and maybe a different set of users have read only permissions where they can read information off of the USB stick but they can’t copy things off.
So that product has a ton of granularity and flexibility built into it to really allow you to control what happens at those endpoints as well as just monitoring what happens, so maybe those employees need that access which you just want to keep an eye on it and see what they’re doing. So you can certainly set it up in that way that they are allowed to read and write but everything they do is going to be logged over to the server.
Bruce Naylor: That’s a very affordable tool as well. So when you also consider your email as another end point in your business?
Kevin Hodak: I would definitely. I mean it’s the kind of thing that user could very easily take sensitive data and forward it out to a Yahoo account or a Gmail account or whatever it may be and then retrieve that from anywhere in the world. So this is something to be concerned about from an email perspective and we have a product as well. GFI mail security that I would say most of our costumers utilize it on the inbound side to keep viruses and malicious attachments from getting into the network. But that product does outbound filtering as well.
So if you wanted to say that particular file names, particular file types, or particular content within the email should get flagged on the outbound side as the user is not allowed to send it. You can set that up as well and have that quarantine where an administrator could eyeball it and say this thing shouldn’t be leaving the organization. I mean you can take the appropriate steps at that point.
Bruce Naylor: So if I have maybe a group of employees in a call center let’s say and they have no needs maybe they will be mailing spreadsheets. I could go ahead and block them as a group as from being able to send an outbound email with this spreadsheet attached.
Kevin Hodak: Yeah, absolutely. The policies can be configured on a per-user or per group basis and you can block individual file types or individual file names or the entire file type itself. So just block all spreadsheets from going out certainly.
Bruce Naylor: Now that, that is so useful and you also can block email based on the verb agent that email as well. You know Kevin, I have a situation that I knew of down in Apples so he was a mortgage lender and some of the folks in there were passing around really nasty jokes back and forth and they were sending to one of the girls there who one day just started printing those out and took them to your lawyer and was able to initiate lawsuit. They cost him a lot of money to defend with something like that mail security. You can quarantine those emails based on some of the stuff in the mail now, could he?
Kevin Hodak: Sure you could look for keywords within the subject or body of the email and if you saw the word “Social Security Number” or “Employee ID” or any of the particular terms that you wanted to identify then you can set that up with something that would be identified on those outbound emails. One other point on the attachment filtering is we perform real file type checking.
Actually with both mail security and endpoint security so if somebody was one of the clever guys in the call center, recognized that we are preventing them from sending out Excel S attachments, then they may try to rename it as a txt or to something else to try to bypass the filter and mail security will identify it as a file type mismatch in quarantine in that point.
Bruce Naylor: That’s pretty good. So what sets the tools like GFI Endpoint Security, mail security apart from its competitive products?
Kevin Hodak: Well, really the thing that kind of as a company sets us apart from a lot of other organizations and it applies to these products as well is that GFI occupies a kind of a unique spot where we’re a big enough company and robust enough in terms our development organization and support organizations though we can have these products with very rich feature sets that offer.
They are very technically competitive in the market place and have a very strong organization behind them while at the same time, recognizing that our suite spot is in the small to medium size business market and pricing and supporting our products accordingly as were able to offer the feature sets that are comparative to the enterprise level solutions while being able to match price with the very small kind of Mom and Pop type shops and that really applies to both of these products that mail security is very competitive in terms of features and just blows away the competition on price when it comes to the other antivirus vendors out there.
And then Endpoint security is the same way and specific to mail security, one of the areas where we find that it stands out above the competition is the ability to use up to five antivirus engines from well known vendors like AVG and Kaspersky and McAfee within the mail security product itself. So we’ll talk more about later kind of the layered security approach and why those five antivirus engines are really an important thing to have.
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