DLP Rolling Review: TrendMicro Leakproof

Trend jumped into the DLP space through its acquisition of Provilla back in October 2007.  As was the case with Mcafee and Symantec, Trend followed the crowd and scooped up a content aware security solution in order to fill in some feature gaps in their endpoint product offering. Almost two years later, Trend seems to have fully integrated Provilla's DLP technology into its core offerings.  In the 250 to 500 seat count range, pricing for LeakProof DLP starts at around $47/seat. The sixty-four thousand dollar question is, does it work?

The LeakProof DLP management server was delivered to the InformationWeek labs as a bootable Linux based ISO image.  Deploying in our test environment was a snap, you won't need professional services.  A wizard driven installation routine worked us through various standard system and network interface configuration tasks.   After completion, we were able to hit the web enabled management interface right away and got right to work trying to break LeakProof 5.0.  

Because LeakProof is primarily an endpoint solution, testing various data in motion leakage scenarios was not applicable here. We concentrated our efforts on the features that LeakProof does focuses on such as data discovery, endpoint device control, and the enforcement of compliance policy through various out of the box and customizable data description and pattern matching rules.

LeakProof uses data using data patterns, keywords, file attributes and digital fingerprinting to find sensitive data before it is transmitted.  Trend managed to get a patent for its "DataDNA" method of digital fingerprinting.  Trend claims that it can uniquely detect with nearly zero false positives any attempt to alter, copy/paste, or otherwise manipulate in any way a data source or file that's been run through the DataDNA process.  DataDNA comes packaged with LeakProof's "Advanced" management server, but DataDNA was unavailable with the standard version sent in for testing.  LeakProof sported compliance templates for PCI, HIPAA, GLBA, along with a couple others structured to find Personally Identfiable Information (PII).