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McAfee To Take On Data Loss Prevention: Page 2 of 2

Last week, the major data loss news came out of IBM, which confirmed that a contractor lost more than one tape containing identifying information on current and former IBM employees. IBM isn't saying how many employees are affected by the lost data, how many tapes are missing, or how they went missing, says an IBM spokesman. He added that the company doesn't believe the tapes were stolen. IBM ran an ad in local papers offering a reward for the return of the tapes.

Data loss headlines haven't just been filling the news for the past few weeks. The parent company of T.J. Maxx, TJX Companies Inc., has suffered a highly publicized breach that has cost it upwards of $17 million in just the past two quarters. Boeing has suffered its own data loss, as has the U.S. Department Veterans Affairs and the Transportation Security Administration.

DeWalt says companies need to be able to tag information -- files, documents -- so they can't leave a device, whether it's a desktop PC, a laptop, or a smartphone, unless they want it to. "You have to set preventions at the host and at the network," he said. "If you classify a document, it gets a little fingerprint and the gateway inspects the packets trying to go out, and checks for those fingerprints. If it's not supposed to leave, it won't."

DeWalt said McAfee's Data Loss Prevention solution can prevent users from digitally removing classified information from a computer, whether they try to print it out, e-mail it, download it on a thumb drive, or cut and paste. "The only thing I can't stop is someone looking at it and writing the information down," he said.