Data Loss Prevention Lessons from X-Men Origins: Wolverine Movie Leak
X-men Origins: Wolverine Poster
On the night of 31st March, 2009 something happened that people initially took as an April Fool’s Joke. But as slowly as millions and millions of people started downloading the workprint of Fox’s upcoming much awaited mega release X-MenOrigins: Â Wolverine, the joke turned into a stark reality that turned into a stressful nightmare for the Fox company. The stage at which this workprint was stolen leads to a suspicion that it was stolen by somebody from within the company and leaked into the Internet as a true DVD quality print.
With the entire movie file being in near-finished DVD quality rip and with just a few unfinished graphics FX scenes the entire movie was almost theatre ready. With such a sky-high budget movie getting leaked over a month before its stated release date, Fox seems to be anticipating a very high loss margin. Fox has declared that it would take strict action against all those people who are responsible for this incident. FBI and MPAA have swung into action now and recently raided a Texas Data Center related to trails involving this incident. At the time of recession and layoff and funds being taken away from industries, Hollywood is already facing a big problem in finance and investment.
X-men Origins: Wolverine Teaser Poster
But anyone who would see this movie would definitely say, “Nah! It’s no fun watching this movie in a Home theatre System or a Laptop. I am going to the theatre in May to see this incredible movie.” Frankly, every dollar that you pay for watching this movie is worth it! The scenes are breathtaking, the storyline keeps you hooked on as if you are listening to a true story-teller and the FX is something which you won’t enjoy unless you go to a Digital Dolby Theatre and let the FX immerse you in a world of fantasy.
However, whatever be the case, Fox has definitely suffered a huge loss due to lack of awareness and protection against Information or Data Loss. The entertainment industry continues to produce creative assets that sell to bring in huge ROI. For such industries, digital asset and information protection from Data Loss is one of the most important management policy which Fox had overlooked and suffered the consequences.
X-men Origins: Wolverine
Data Loss Protection no doubt is a billion dollar market in the entire world and bringing in huge investments. Even antivirus companies are acquiring Data Loss Prevention companies to bundle their products with their own thus selling a complete security suite for personal computer users as well as the Enterprise or Corporate offices. Such Data Loss Prevention products are readily available in the market which block and secure USB drives and other ports through which data can be stolen or leaked or malicious data can enter the entire system.
With USB drive storage capacity reaching sky-high standards, It’s not that only companies and corporate offices who need to be aware about protecting digital information and files but even personal individuals should lock up their USB ports to prevent unauthorized access to their computers when they are unattended.
Dataresolve Technologies have already released two version of the product called uHook Personal for home users and corporates respectively. The company is soon coming up with uGuard (code named) which promises excellent USB drive security by blazingly fast strong encryption of the USB devices, such that even if anybody steals and takes the data out of the enterprise but he won’t be able to use it outside of the company. It’s high time you understand that every PC user has been a victim of data theft once atleast but why not prevent it from happening in the future.
Data loss through defunct payment gateway
Recently, a de-functional payment gateway exposed as many as 19,000 credit card numbers. Details could be found here. The exposed data was cached by google and includes 22,000 credit card numbers, including CVVs, expiry dates, names and addresses.
If your organization deals with online credit processing through your own payment gateway, make sure that you don’t fall prey to misconfigured on insecure gateway, which could lead to not only the possibility of hacking and data tempering but also a much bigger risk of your data being crawled and cached by search engine biggies like google.
This makes the situation even more serious because search engine starts making everyone aware about this mess by start processing the data it found on your gateway, starts indexing it, putting its data mining algorithms to connect your information to billions of other pages and keywords.
data loss
uHook Personal 2.1 Released!
uHook Personal 2.1 Summary Screen
The award wining “uHook Personal” generated so many downloads just within few days of its first release that, we were forced to release its next major upgrade “uHook Personal 2.1″ before scheduled time.
The product helps you protect your files and data from unauthorized access to USB Disks, Flash Drives, SD Card, IPODs, Digital Cameras, Cell Phones etc. uHook Personal is meant to be used for both the home users as well as corporates. A fully functional trial version of this application is available on the homepage of the publisher Dataresolve Technologies and all the top download websites. The full version can be purchased online from the publisher’s secure online store at plimus which accepts almost all credit cards, wire transfers and paypal.
The product received good appreciation from most of the top download online software archives and have been listed in all the top download websites including download.com, softpedia.com, upload.com and almost all the websites of CNET. The best part of the second version of uHook Perosnal 2.1 is that, it has been specially designed to work optimally on Windows Vista. Following is another screenshot of the installation of uHook on Windows Vista which was tested by Softpedia
uHook Personal 2.1 Settings Screen
uHook has a dependency of .Net Framework 2.0 which needs to be installed before installing uHook. .Net framework can be downloaded from http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/7/567758a3-759e-473e-bf8f-52154438565a/dotnetfx.exe.
All windows Vista machines already have this framework installed. So, there is no need to install it on Vista machines. .Net framework will be needed only on windows XP machines. But, as most of the other application needs .Net Framework, so, there is a possibility that you might be having this framework already installed. Whatever the case may be, if uhook doesn’t find appropriate .Net framework installed on your machine, it will give you a pop up to install the framework and installation can be continued after you are done with .Net installation.
Following are some of the important features of uHook Personal:-
uHook Personal 2.0 Features
Unauthorized Access Blocking Completely blocks all kinds of unauthorized or unidentifiable USB storage device from your machine.
Multiple Device Blocking Monitor USB Drives, SD Cards, IPODS through USB, Cameras, Mobile Phones, External USB Hard Drives, External USB CD Drives insertions and confidential file copy operations.
User Activity Files Copied Reporting and Printing Selectively Monitor users for their file copy activities on USB storage devices.
Set your own Policy Set policies for blocking and monitoring mechanism depending on your requirement.
Takes Care of your data 24X7 Can stop others from copying your files even if you just leave your desktop\laptops open.
Simple user Experience Easy to use, install and do not need any prior software knowledge.
Less Resource Consumption uHook Personal uses very minimal system resoruce.
