A surge of articles on insider threats have taken over the information security headlines over the past few weeks. According to Forrester, insiders have emerged as the top source of breaches in the last 12 months, with 36 percent of breaches the result of inadvertent misuse of data by employees. More surprisingly, 25 percent of respondents said a malicious insider was the most common source of a breach. HiSoftware, a leading provider of compliance and security solutions, today announced a solution to this growing problem by offering multiple options for the secure exchange and viewing of sensitive and regulated Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Server File Shares content to ensure secure internal collaboration and sharing with third party recipients.
 
The new capabilities included with the latest release of HiSoftware Security Sheriff address some of the challenges to secure collaboration of sensitive information stored in File Shares and SharePoint; from personal and healthcare information (PII and PHI), HR documents, intellectual property and confidential company information. SharePoint by default downloads Office and PDF documents for users to view them and then allows users to save, print, or copy a viewed document. With the new Secure Document Viewer included in Security Sheriff, users can open an encrypted document in a protected state to ensure that a user with read-only permission cannot open and decrypt a document, then manually distribute it using print, save as, and send to actions, or copy its contents. It will then remove the file from their system once the file is closed. The release also contains new features to prevent users from emailing SharePoint document attachments by instead requiring that they send a link to the document’s location. In addition to ensuring only permissioned users can access the file, it also alleviates some of the issues caused by emailing SharePoint document attachments, including duplication and version control.
 
Collaboration is also not limited to internal employees anymore. Companies often need to send confidential information housed in these systems to third parties. For example legal counsel, financial information to directors/managers before it is announced for SEC compliance, and quotations to clients that need to remain privileged. This latest release extends the native data security functions provided by the HiSoftware suite to documents sent to recipients outside of SharePoint by allowing users to generate secure certificated, read-only PDFs that can be sent as email attachments. It not only restricts who can receive and view attachments using the certificate, it also provides controls to prevent recipients from performing actions such as print, send to and copy functions to protect against sensitive data misuse and leakage.
 
“The benefits of collaboration are huge, but the potential for data breaches and misuse keep security and compliance officers, and the IT managers who manage information systems, up at night,” said Kurt Mueffelmann, president and CEO, HiSoftware. “There are steps you can take to better protect sensitive information and mitigate risk. At HiSoftware we understand the value of collaboration and offer solutions to help organizations securely exchange data and ideas, while minimizing the potential for damaging breaches caused by ‘whoops’ moments or malicious intent.”
 
Key new features of Security Sheriff include:
· Secure Document Exchange
 o The secure email feature provides dual factor of authorization to which emails (with attachments) can be sent. Using PKI certificates, entities can exchange information/attachments only to trusted parties that have exchanged credentials/certificates. The attachments can only be opened by recipients that have their credentials (certificates) embedded in the document.
 o Attachments are automatically converted to and sent as a secure, read-only PDF file. Users are prevented from printing or copying content from the document.
 o The secured PDF attachment contains a watermark bearing the details of the user who sent the email, machine name that it was sent from, and a date/time stamp.
· Secure Document Viewer
 o Provides a secure PDF viewer that converts read-only Security Sheriff encrypted documents into a secured PDF document for viewing after it has been decrypted.
 o Ensures that a user with read-only permission to document encrypted by Security Sheriff cannot open the document (decrypt) and manually distribute it using print, save as, and send to actions, or copy its contents.
 o The secure PDF document produced for viewing will contain a watermark containing the user, machine name that it was sent from, and a date/time stamp.
 o Removes the PDF from the user’s system once the file is closed for added security.
· Prevent users from emailing SharePoint document attachments
 o Organizations can control whether or not attachments can be emailed using individual document classification, or the send link only control can be set for all documents.
 o Email attachments are automatically converted into a link to the original document on the SharePoint site. The recipient will only be able to access the document if they have the correct permissions; otherwise they will get an “access denied” message.