Content Security Risks
Content Security concerns the monitoring and controlling of all electronic information entering or leaving an organization. Content security matters include the protection against viruses and spam, transmission of confidential data, filtering of content, encryption and reducing legal liability exposure to organizations. Businesses continually are at risk from conditions that they may not even be aware of, and which puts their corporation in a potential position of danger. Electronic transmittal of information between employees and individuals outside of the firm is a basic requirement for operation of most companies. The Internet, and especially the use of e-mail, has made the process much simpler, but has also increased the vulnerabilities that a firm faces.
Content that is transmitted from the company without the knowledge or monitoring by the IT department introduces legal risks. It is difficult to discover possible breaches of policy, such as sharing of confidential company information, and including holding individuals accountable, without Content Security filtering and monitoring.
Document metadata describes attributes to documents like its title, author, location, content, and creation date. Risks associated with breaches of metadata associated with electronic documents are frequently ignored when Content Security is approached. There are many kinds of metadata, such as metadata for electronic documents, metadata for websites and metadata for video files. Knowing metadata information is helpful when cataloging electronic information, but metadata can also reveal confidential and even possibly embarrassing data to unintended recipients.
Many people do not know that it may be entirely possible to peer inside to see the history of all changes made to a Microsoft Word document since it was first saved. That information can include all of the various edits, including deletions, made by others, added comments added in it by you or your co-workers, in addition to over 20 other kinds of hidden information. This means that Word documents should never be sent out without being sure that they are “clean” or converted to a form like Acrobat PDF. Content Security is a concern that all business need to analyze and make efforts to implement.
