Preventing Data Leakage via Email

1. Preventing DataLeakage via Email RostislavPinski Dmitry Kaganov Eli Shtein Alexander Gorohovski

2. Introduction • Most of the people that use email communication can confirm that at least once they have sent an email to the wrong recipient. • Such a mistake can be very damaging. Inappropriate jokes may be sent to a supervisor, financial reports may be sent to a competitor or a broker, love letter to the wrong man or woman. • An example of such incident was published on portfolio.com site on February 5th 2008: “One of Eli Lilly & Co.'s sub-contracted lawyers at Philadelphia based Pepper Hamilton had mistakenly emailed confidential Eli Lilly's discussions to Times reporter Alex Berenson (instead of Bradford Berenson, her co-counsel), costing Eli Lilly nearly $1 billion.”

3. Introduction (cont.) • Modern business activities rely on extensive email exchange. Email “wrong recipients” mistakes have become widespread, and the severe damage caused by such mistakes constitutes a disturbing problem both for organizations and for individuals. • Various solutions to this problem are continuously emerging, however there is still no “silver-bullet”  solution: many email addressing mistakes are not detected and in many cases correct recipients are wrongly marked as potential addressing mistake.

4. Project Purpose To develop a “Preventing Data Leakage via Email» system for some e-mail client. The system will work using a theoretic model developed by Douche Telecom researchers and presented in the “Analyzing Group Communication for Preventing Data Leakage via Email “ article.

5. Hi-level system use-case • The user composes an e-mail and pushes “send” button. • The e-mail is sent for inspection and validation by the system. • In case non-valid recipients are detected, a list of non-valid recipients will be displayed to the user for confirmation whether to continue sending to the non-valid recipients or no. • Optionally - alist of additional suggested recipients for this e-mail will be displayed to the user. • Optionally - the user will be able to send the e-mail easily to any of the recipients from the suggested recipients list.

6. Main Challenges • Changing the “send” button functionality (without having an access to its’ code). • Developing a system that can be relative easily adapted to any e-mail client. • Developing a server that can serve a plenty of clients simultaneously. • The delay in sending the e-mail should be linear to the e-mails’ size and not longer than half a minute. • Data Security • Modularity

7. Questions?

8. Thank You!