Data Element Fingerprinting

To meet the data protection requirements of today’s enterprises, Code Green Networks has developed Data Element Fingerprinting technology that specifically protects structured content —confidential customer or employee data such as names, account information, social security numbers and credit card details contained in databases, spreadsheets or other structured files.

Accurately Protecting Personal Information

Data Element Fingerprinting allows organizations to go well beyond traditional techniques that simply attempt to identify sensitive customer or employee data and personal information based on patterns or expressions in electronic communications. Data Element Fingerprinting is highly accurate and ensures minimal false positives due to the fact organizations fingerprint the exact confidential data or personal information to be protected, rather than relying on simply on pattern matching or keyword techniques for identification of potential sensitive content.

Organizations can explicitly identify up to 20 million data elements stored in databases or other structured file formats, such as spreadsheets and CSV files. And granular content registration allows for identification of specific types of confidential data from within large data stores, including individual data fields or columns of data that should be protected.

For example, an organization may have a comprehensive set of information stored about clients in a customer database but only want to fingerprint the more sensitive information about them, such as names and credit card numbers.

Once the confidential data is identified, Data Element Fingerprinting captures and stores representative signatures of the data elements to be protected on the Content Inspection Appliance. It then compares these signatures, in real time, to content transmitted across the network. If it detects a match, it can then invoke the appropriate policy and take action on it.

By connecting directly to databases such as MS SQL or Oracle RDBMS and establishing regular crawling of these data sources, Code Green Networks is able to ensure fingerprints are automatically updated with the latest confidential data with minimal administrator management.

Policies can also be configured to trigger varying levels of incidents and types of actions to be taken depending on the type or quantity of customer data identified in a specific electronic communication, or transaction. For example, you can set a policy to simply log an incident if less than four social security numbers appear in an email, but trigger the email to be blocked if it contains five or more social security numbers alongside specific customer names.

Data Element Fingerprinting is an accurate and effective tool for protecting sensitive customer or employee information and demonstrating compliance with state and federal regulations specific to the handling of personal information.