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About Data Border

Our Work

THE IDEA


During many years working in and leading systems development in large corporate environments, Data Border's founder Trevor Watkins saw the gradual tightening of policies and processes around how IT systems were managed and used. Restrictions were being put in place to guard against mistakes, unplanned changes and wrong-doing.

Protecting against data loss was high on the priority list and the ways information could leak out of organisations were being closed off. As data thefts led to the introduction of Data Loss Prevention controls on the channels used to take the data, then evolution in ex-filtration approaches ... the idea was born to stay a step ahead of the data ex-filtration curve. [See: DLP Evolution]

VALIDATION


After some research into unorthodox approaches of transferring data, Trevor set about prototyping tools to verify that data could be easily transferred by mainstream users with normal permissions through output channels intended for humans, and whether this would bypass the DLP systems that proudly guarded network, email, web and USB based ex-filtration. [See: Components Of DLP] The 'hacker' approach of finding ways around protections quickly proved fruitful with data senders and receivers working on multiple channels. [See: Data Transfer / Ex-filtration Tools]

COMPANY FORMATION & IDEA PROTECTION


With the aim of securing these holes, Data Border was incorporated in June 2017. Data Border designed and developed a system to detect and prevent data leakage through the channels the proof of concept exploits take advantage of. As the protection system was proved, Data Border filed an extensive patent to protect the techniques used to protect these channels. [See: Our Protection Explained]

VERSUS TRADITIONAL DLP


Data Border focusses on cutting edge data leakage channels; the traditional data transfer mechanisms [USB, CDRW, Email, Web...] are well covered by existing DLP solutions so rather than compete, we recommend the use of one or more of them a complementary to the protections Data Border provides. [See: Traditional DLP Vendors]

PUBLICITY & LAUNCH


Data Border started publicising the covert channel vulnerabilities from BlackHat (Las Vegas, 4th-9th August) and B-Sides (Manchester, 16th August), press releases and the release of the Data Border DLP product.

EARLY DETECTION OF DATA LEAKAGE


As a result of testing the Data Border POC exploit's with a couple of large organisations, we were asked how else they could protect themselves against the data leakage risk we were highlighting. Direct protection of the traditional perimeter is strong and with our covert channel DLP, ex-filtrating data is now extremely difficult. We were however able to recommend broad and detailed analysis of activity to detect the unusual behaviours as precursors to data leaks or other damaging actions.

Abnormal systems usage patterns such as viewing or gathering data internally, out of band or hours access or unusual data flows can be better identified on the basis of being unusual rather than with pre-determined rules. The key here being to use machine learning to identify activity that differs from the objectively learned norm within the organisation.



About Us

THE TEAM


Data Border remains small with only a handful of individuals involved to date, focussed mainly on the concept, market positioning, vulnerability research & exploit POCs, technical design and implementation of our DLP solution.

The high-profile launch planned for early 2022 will need a sales team to field the (expected) enquiries and pre-sales which we are starting to look for now.

We have a backlog of enhancements to our unique DLP product which we busy developing, so we are also on the lookout for additional strong software engineers with relevant experience and cyber security interest.

Data Border

Prevent covert channel data leaks.
Detect rogue insiders & suspicious activity.

Phone: +44 (0)203-4111451

Email: enquiries@databorder.com

 

Registered in England & Wales
Co. Number: 10829289
VAT: 272 1175 22