Zlock^TM Endpoint Security Software

Statistics on departing employees misusing confidential proprietory data are frankly chilling. A survey conducted in early 2009 by Ponemon Institute on a staff of 1000 workers that recently changed jobs revealed that 59% of  them did not feel any wrongdoing in taking company's data when leaving or asked to leave a job. Roughly two-thirds of the group admitted using the data to gain an edge when applying for a new job. The information taken includes customers' data, email and contact lists, employee records, financial records, confidential business documents and other intellectual property.

While majority of workers "in transit" do not intend to cause their former employers substantial damages, some of the biggest security threats can come from disloyal and/or disgruntled employees. An unhappy worker with privileged data access rights could cause an organization more damage than any outside attack. That is because the insider knows what the company’s most valuable data assets are and where to look for them. Things are getting more difficult when the offender knows how to circumvent the detection mechanisms in order to get hold of that data unnoticed.

This is especially true during economic downturns when companies reduce their staff to preserve capital. Naturally, there is an increased anxiety and distress among the workforce throughout such times and an organization should not underestimate potentially devastating effects of misuse of data by its employees. The problem is significantly intensified by a widespread proliferation of mobile storage devices connected via USB ports, such as flash-memory drives, hard drives, MP3 players and other digital recording media. Unless these USB and other peripheral devices are locked down and monitored at all perimeter endpoints, they provide a convenient, virtually undetectable way to obtain and move around vast amounts of corporate data.

Zlock is an endpoint security software solution that was specifically designed and developed to address today’s corporate needs to prevent data leakage by securing and managing various computer ports including USB, LPT,  Firewire, Serial, etc. Zlock provides lockdown of computer ports and management console to implement a port/device user access control. User access control, which is based on access control lists (ACL), is tightly integrated with Active Directory (AD). System administrators can take full advantage of the existing AD user groups, which can be assigned various port/device access levels, such as: allowing full access; read only; or denying the access altogether.

USB-pluggable or other devices can be classified by different criterion, such as device type, device code, device manufacturer and serial number, etc. This enables system administrators to create custom port/device access policies based on any defined device classification and assign them to users. For example, a device access policy could be defined to prohibit use of any USB-flash drive, authorize use of USB tokens to authenticate users, or disable USB altogether.