Recent disclosures of State Department documents by WikiLeaks point to an alarming need for both government and industry to look closer at document security technology and online collaboration platforms.
Boston, MA, December 01, 2010 — Recent disclosures of State Department documents by WikiLeaks point to an alarming need for both government and industry to look closer at document security technology and online collaboration platforms.
On Sunday, November 28, WikiLeaks.org published 251,287 confidential documents of which more than 100,000 are classified from 274 U.S. foreign embassies around the world and the U.S. Secretary of State’s office. It is considered the largest set of leaked Government classified documents ever to be made public. More than 15,000 of these communication cables are classified Secret.
By Monday the White House instructed federal departments to take immediate steps to try to “prevent any future WikiLeaks-like disclosures” and ordered agencies to review the way they handle secret, sensitive information.
“The recent irresponsible disclosure by WikiLeaks has resulted in significant damage to our national security,” wrote director of the Office of Management and Budget Jack Lew, in a memo posted on the OMB website.
Referring to WikiLeaks, Lew wrote: “Our national defense requires that sensitive information be maintained in confidence to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, and our homeland. Protecting information critical to our nation’s security is the responsibility of each individual who is granted access to classified information.”
Fortunately, technology companies like Brainloop ( http://www.brainloop.com ) are working with U.S. and international entities to provide a secure online workspace where government and business can freely collaborate on highly confidential information without fear of leaks or losing control over their documents.
“A lot of improvements in document security and lifecycle management have been made since the first of the leaked documents were created,” said Brainloop CEO Peter Weger.
“Over the last 10 years we’ve made huge advances in the technology to protect digitized documents from leaking into unauthorized hands. Today there’s no reason for documents to be shared without protection,” added Weger.
“Industry best practices are to apply encryption, watermarking, rights management and other protections to shared files in all formats, either on a secure platform hosted in a certified datacenter or as a deployed solution on the organization’s own server,” said Weger. “Security conscious organizations roll out centrally defined policies to prevent unintentional disclosure and use a tamper-proof audit trail to prevent intentional misuse of their most sensitive documents.”
Brainloop is used internationally by hundreds of renowned companies including BMW, Deutsche Telekom, Eurocopter, law firms and banks, to collaborate on documents with individuals inside and outside the enterprise, setting forth specific access controls and privileges with respect to editing, downloading, emailing and printing of confidential documents.
Most recently the company sponsored the publication of a white paper titled “Managing Information Risk in the Extended Enterprise: Why Corporate Compliance and IT Security Must Join Forces,” authored by Michael Rasmussen of Corporate Integrity LLC, a noted authority in understanding governance, risk and compliance (GRC) processes.
The paper examines how the distributed nature of working with confidential documents in collaborative settings between employees, external auditors, strategic partners, or any other individuals outside the corporate network poses a serious security risk.
“Managing Information Risk in the Extended Enterprise,” is available at:http://www.brainloop.com/fileadmin/assets/PDFs/White_Papers/brainloop_white_paper_managing_information_risk.pdf
About Brainloop:
Brainloop, with offices in Boston and Munich, is the leading supplier of software solutions for high-security document collaboration. Brainloop’s secure online workspace is a virtual document safe that enables secure filing, editing and distribution of highly confidential documents within a single company, and beyond. All contents are powerfully protected from unauthorized internal or external access, and all actions within the application are documented by a tamper-proof audit trail. Frequent uses include contract negotiations, collecting data and compiling quarterly reports, collaboration with external auditors and counsel, and any other communication that contains confidential information. http://www.brainloop.com
Press & Media Contact:
Victor Cruz, Principal
MediaPR.net, Inc
Boston, MA
(401) 349-3369
vcruz@mediapr.net
http://www.brainloop.com
