RegExs – How TMC Can Protect Vulnerable PII

Regular Expressions or (RegEx’s) are alphanumeric grouping of characters that have a specific pattern (and relevance or meaning to an application, entity or consumer). Many programming languages have built in regular expression engines to allow the parsing of data to find these patterns. Let’s take a look at a quick example.

Many security standards emerging or present in today’s market focus on the protection of PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Items such as national identification numbers (such as the US Social Security Number or the UK’s National Health Service Number) are government issued identification cards used for everything from tracking employment to assuring healthcare for its citizens. In addition, privately issued items like credit cards and university student ID numbers are also the focus of predatory attacks (if you’re curious, browse The Data Breach Blog for examples of theft as well as the potential impact to corporations, governments and private citizens).

The emergence of global security standards like PCI DSS in financial markets as well as government driven legislation (like the recently announced HITECH Act in the United States as well as privacy/security legislation developed by the European Union) have created the following requirements:

· Requirements to monitor requests for and the ongoing protection of PII

· Financial and punitive penalties for offending organizations who disclose PII

Obviously, this impacts a range of business markets, multiple levels of government as well as the consumer. It makes sense that there exists greater willingness to work with a company or provider that takes the PII threat seriously and have policies and systems in place to minimize the threat of information loss.

As part of our Message Classification for Outlook product, customers can now define not only keywords but use pre-defined or built-in regular expressions TMC’s Content Validation policy provides capabilities to search for specific regular expressions and warn the customer of their presence in the email message or an attachment.

To check emails and attachments for regular expressions, the TMC Administrator creates a Content Validation policy and defines whether they wish to check for keywords, regular expressions or both. Several regular expressions are pre-defined, and customers can build their own regular expressions if they wish (for a good reference, see the fantastic regular expression cheat sheet developed by Dave Child here).

Now, let’s move back to what the consumer experience is like. In the following scenario, an employee unknowingly attaches a Microsoft Office document which contains Social Security Number information, clicks Send, and classifies the email as Public. The Content Validation policy finds the SSN in the Word document and notifies the sender of the issue.

 

TMC provides customers several strong benefits for organizations concerned with PII protection:

1.    Immediate analysis (warnings are presented to the user at the same time the email is sent vs. feedback from a quarantine mailbox)

2.    Feedback to the consumer can be customized (the TMC Administrator can create information messages indicating why the error occurred as well as steps to be taken to rectify the problem)

3.    Adaptable controls (the TMC Administrator can simply warn the user of the issue but give them final decision on delivery or prevent sending the message until the sensitive content is removed from the message body or attachment.

4.    Monitored – all policy events in TMC are written to the Windows Event Log (which can be parsed for reporting to identify common errors (resulting in guidance on where employees may need training or policies may need to be refined.

 

I would be happy to receive feedback on regular expressions you would like to see added to the product. Please feel free to contact me at stephen.kingston@titus-labs.com.

 

-Stephen Kingston